policy & reform
The Tuckwell Scholarship Program begins in 2014, with each scholarship paying $ 20,000 annually to 25 starting undergraduates each year for up to five years.
“ The majority of philanthropic funding enables the University to undertake more activity than it would do otherwise, whether it is to offer more scholarships or employ more academic research and teaching staff,” she says.
“ The potential impact of philanthropic funding is demonstrated by a number of Ivy League universities in the USA and Russell Group universities in the UK, where a significant proportion of their income comes from philanthropy and that has enabled them to become world-leading institutions.”
The University of Wollongong, for example, knows only too well that sizeable philanthropic donations don’ t come around very often, but are in every way vital to the school’ s future.
“ Philanthropic funding provides a margin of excellence for strategic priorities at the University of Wollongong – it is not aimed at addressing funding shortfalls,” says Monique Harper-Richardson, director of advancement at the University of Wollongong. She has presided over the raising of more than $ 18.5 million dollars of philanthropic support in the past four years.
Last year, the University of Wollongong received a $ 7 million donation from the Abbott Foundation, by far the largest such donation received by the university.
It was the offering of venture capitalist Christopher Abbott. He conceptualised the Abbott Foundation in 2009, with the aim of providing learning opportunities for young children.
Abbott’ s donation will go towards a $ 44 million early start facility, which will feature a 2000m sq. children’ s discovery centre that includes activity and exhibition space as well as‘ discovery galleries’.
The federal government contributed a further $ 31 million from its Education Investment Fund.
20 | April 2013
Graham Tuckwell
International comparisons For the purposes of contrast and comparison, philanthropic donations made to some US universities can and do easily outstrip the GDP of small countries. And judging by the rate at which Australia’ s universities are producing incredibly successful business people, it won’ t be long before we begin to catch up.
According to an article in the University World News, Stanford University has become the first tertiary institution to collect more than $ 1 billion in fundraising in a single year. It is said that within the past decade, Stanford alone has raised $ US6.2 billion.
In the 2012 fiscal year, roughly 3500 US colleges and universities raised $ US31 billion. After Stanford, Harvard University raised $ US650 million, Yale $ US544 million, the University of Southern California $ US492 million and Columbia University $ US490 million. England’ s Oxford University has raised £ 1.3 billion in the past eight years.
“ Overseas, the answer to this question is predominantly‘ the alumni’,” Dr Peter Elliot, manager development, development and communications office, Murdoch University, says.“ Many Australian universities are relatively young, so they don’ t have the depth of alumni that European and American universities possess.
“ In Britain and America, it is the norm for students to travel some distance from home to attend university, and often live on campus. This creates a much stronger bond between these students and their former campuses than is the case for most Australians, who tend to commute from the family home to a nearby university.
“ These older universities have literally hundreds of thousands of alumni at their fingertips; Murdoch has about 50,000.
As a young university, Murdoch’ s earliest graduates are only now reaching retirement age, which tends to be a time people feel
under less financial pressure and often determine to give back to society in some way.
“ Our youth as a university also means that relatively few of our alumni have died and left a legacy to Murdoch in their wills. Nevertheless, we recently received a bequest for about $ 800,000.”
Elliot believes it is vital for the survival of universities that they seek nongovernment funding but he does believe it is not all one-way traffic when bequests come into academic institutions.
“ It seems to be a global reality that governments around the world, while unanimous on the value of tertiary education seem equally unanimous about trying to reduce their contributions to it,” Elliot says.
“ I suspect this is somewhat of a catch-22. Universities everywhere are becoming increasingly sophisticated in ways of raising money; as governments notice this, they tend to see an opportunity to reduce funding to universities, which in turn forces universities to become even more efficient in attracting support.”“ Philanthropic funding is only a small percentage of the overall university funding, but it is important,” agrees former chief executive officer of UNSW Jenny Bott.
“ It is in some ways easier to deal with to because normally it is only one person giving away their money. You will always see companies giving away their money because of self-interest. They want to see the benefits through research and potential employees.
“ At the moment we see older universities attracting bigger donations but that won’ t always be the case. It is an area that is growing across the board and it is important for individuals to continue to bequest money to universities because you can make an immediate difference.” n