As Tufts works toward its goal of raising $1.2 billion with its capital campaign, the Office of University Advancement is forced to do battle with one of Tufts' most daunting statistics: a 21-percent alumni giving rate.
This number represents the percentage of alumni who are considered active donors, meaning they make donations annually.
The percentage is used in U.S. News and World Report's annual college rankings as a measure of alumni involvement. It comprises 5 percent of a school's overall score in the rankings, which also includes selectivity, peer ranking and graduation and retention rates.
According to U.S. News' 2007 rankings, Tufts had an alumni giving percentage of 24 percent last year, slightly higher than the current 21 percent reported to the Daily by Chris Simoneau, the director of Central Development Programs. The 24-percent figure puts Tufts at 41st among national universities - well below its 28th-place spot overall in U.S. News' 2007 rankings of national universities.
Dartmouth College, Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania are listed by University President Lawrence Bacow as Tufts' biggest overlap schools, meaning they share the most common undergraduate applicants with Tufts. These schools have giving percentages of 52 (third in the nation), 39 (seventh) and 39 (eighth), respectively. Princeton University was ranked first with a donor giving rate of 60 percent.
"Those levels are the envy of every institution in the United States," said Brian Lee, vice president of university advancement.
But Lee called the percentage an imperfect measure and an imperfect proxy of alumni involvement.
"We're far more interested in creating this lifetime of active engagement of Tufts students than we are in obsessing about the number as used in U.S. News and World Report," Lee said.
Williams College, one ot Tufts' peer schools, was ranked fourth in alumni giving among liberal arts colleges. It has a rate of 58 percent. Another peer school, Amherst College, had a percentage of 61 percent and was ranked second.
"It's something that both schools take very seriously, focus on and work very hard to achieve and maintain," said Stephen Birrell, vice president of alumni relations and development at Williams.
Birrell was surprised to hear that Tufts' alumni percentage number was a self-described 21 percent. "I guess my response to that would be [that] I'm surprised it's not higher," he said.
Alumni giving is part of the institutional culture at Williams and Amherst, Birrell said. He added that Williams puts a lot of focus on its annual fund, to which alumni give unrestricted money every year, as well as its 25-year and 50-year reunion donations.
Birrell said that capital campaigns should strengthen alumni giving and increase the number of active donors by strengthening other alumni giving programs, such as a university's annual fund. Williams is in the midst of its own capital campaign, which Birrell prefers to call a "comprehensive campaign."
"Your comprehensive campaigns should have as an objective to strengthen those programs, so when the campaign is over, they're all operating at a higher level," Birrell said.
Regardless of its low alumni giving percentage, Tufts is on pace to reach its $1.2-billion goal, having received two gifts of $100 million or more and many other multi-million-dollar donations.
Ann Kaplan, the director of the Voluntary Support of Education Survey for the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), said that Tufts need not worry about its alumni participation numbers, which she said are better than the national average.
In fiscal year 2007, the mean alumni giving rate at a private doctoral research university was 16.6 percent, according to the CAE. Tufts' rate for that fiscal year was 20.1 percent, according to the CAE's numbers.
Kaplan echoed Lee's statement that the alumni giving percentage does not tell the whole story about alumni participation and activity.
"I really don't think that alumni participation is the metric even for alumni loyalty," Kaplan said. "It measures exactly what it says it measures."
She added that donors who structure their gifts using different vehicles might not get credit in alumni participation, thus lowering the percentages.
Additionally, as colleges do a better job of keeping track of alumni, their alumni participation percentage will naturally decrease because their pool of alumni will increase. Kaplan said that it takes a lot longer to cultivate an active donor than to locate and track alumni.
"The better your records are, the lower your participation is going to be," Kaplan said.
She added that Tufts' endowment per student, while under the average for private doctoral research universities, has still increased at a dramatic pace every year for the past 10 years. It was $154,602 per student in fiscal year 2007, up from $91,704 in fiscal year 2005.
Despite its limitations, the alumni giving percentage is important for colleges to track, Kaplan said. Universities should have a strong sense of their alumni body's capacity to give and inclination to give to the institution, she said.
"It's not that you don't want to worry about it; it's that you want to know your own particular situation and benchmark against yourself," Kaplan said.
