Although most of last year’s top higher education news stories were concerned with campus turmoil of one sort or the other, 2024 also proved to be another banner year for colleges and universities on the philanthropic front.
Last year, more than a dozen higher education institutions received “mega gifts,” those private donations from individuals or organizations of $100 million or more. Here’s a quick summary of the leading contributions, several of which set new institutional records.
Medical Education
Leading the list were four mega gifts in support of medical education and research.
Michael Bloomberg gave $1 billion via Bloomberg Philanthropies to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to make medical school free for a majority of students, while also increasing financial aid for students at JHU’s schools of nursing, public health, and other graduate schools.
Ruth Gottesman, professor emerita in the Albert Einstein College of Medicine gave the school $1 billion to provide free medical school tuition for students in perpetuity.
Bloomberg also made a $600 million donation to the endowments of four historically Black medical schools. The medical schools at Howard, Meharry, and Morehouse each received gifts of $175 million, and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Science was given $75 million.
Columbia University was given $400 million by alumni Roy and Diana Vagelos. It was the largest single contribution ever made to Columbia’s medical school and will be used to establish the Roy and Diana Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Science. The focus of the new institute will be to train physician-scientists to transform basic biomedical discoveries into new treatments for a host of different diseases, including blood and immune system disorders, cancers, metabolic disorders, and inflammatory, neurological, and cardiovascular conditions.
The University of California, Los Angeles was given $120 million by surgeon, inventor and philanthropist Dr. Gary Michelson and his wife, Alya. The gift, distributed via the Michelson Medical Research Foundation will help establish the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy.
With the gift, two research entities will be created, each funded with $50 million. The first will focus on rapid vaccine development, and the second will concentrate on using the microbiome to advance human health. In addition, a $20 million endowment will fund research grants for young scientists working in the areas of immunotherapy research, human immunology and vaccine discovery.
Largest Art Donation
Richard Hedreen, a Seattle hotel and real estate developer, gave his art collection estimated to be worth $300 million to Seattle University. He also donated $25 million to help develop a museum to house the collection. According to the university, the donation was the largest gift of art ever made to an American college.
Small College Records
DePauw University announced in February that it had received a record $200 million gift consisting of $150 million from an anonymous donor plus $50 million in matching support from other contributors. The combined donation was the largest gift ever given to DePauw, a private liberal arts institution in Greencastle, Indiana with an enrollment of slightly more than 1,800 students.
Catawba College, a private liberal arts college in Salisbury, North Carolina, received a $200 million gift from an anonymous donor. It was the second such gift the institution has received in the last three years. Two-thirds of the donation went for unrestricted funding for the college, with the remaining third directed to programs that support environmental education and sustainability, which historically has been a priority of the institution.
Financial Aid
Dartmouth College received a $150 million bequest from the late Glenn Britt and his late wife, Barbara. The donation, the largest bequest for scholarships in Dartmouth’s history, will be used to increase financial aid for undergraduate and graduate students in the Tuck School of Business.
Washington and Lee University was given $132 million by alum, William H. “Bill” Miller III. The gift was the largest in the university’s history and was dedicated to financial aid. It will allow W&L to go need-blind in its admissions of undergraduate students while also honoring its existing commitment to meet 100% of students’ demonstrated financial need with aid packages that do not include loans.
The University of Arkansas announced it had received a $100 million planned gift for student scholarships from Jane Hunt and Bryan Hunt. The gift will help support the public phase of a three-year $200 million fundraising campaign on behalf of the university’s new Land of Opportunity Scholarship.
LaGuardia Community College, a two-year institution in the City University of New York system, received a donation of $116.2 million from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, the largest gift ever received by CUNY and also the largest in history for any U.S. community college. The funds will be used to create the Cohen Career Collective, a 160,000 square-foot career and workforce training center.
Minority-Serving Institutions and Rural Students
The Lilly Endowment awarded a $100 million unrestricted grant to the United Negro College Fund, the largest gift received by the organization in its 80-year history. The gift will go toward ongoing UNCF’s $1 billion capital campaign. The goal is to build a pooled endowment that will increase the endowments of UNCF’s 37 member institutions by $10 million each.
Spelman College received $100 million in January, the largest single donation ever made to a historically Black college or university. The gift was made by college trustee Ronda Stryker and her husband William Johnston. Of the total, $75 million will endow scholarships, and the remaining $25 will be used to “develop an academic focus on public policy and democracy, improve student housing and provide flexible funding to meet critical strategic needs,” according to the college.
The STARS College Network, a group of 32 universities working to enroll more students from rural and small-town America received a commitment from Trott Family Philanthropies of more than $150 million to be distributed over 10 years for more programming to prepare, recruit, and support rural students in higher education.
Research Institutes and Other Initiatives
The College of William & Mary announced a $100 million gift that will be used to establish the Batten School of Coastal and Marine Sciences. The donation, the largest ever in William & Mary’s 331-year history, was made by Jane Batten, a Virginia-based philanthropist, who, along with Frank Batten, her late husband, have been major supporters of William & Mary, several other Virginia colleges and universities, and a number of environmental conservation causes.
Purdue University was given a grant by the Lilly Endowment totaling $100 million for two separate university initiatives. The commitment represents the largest private gift in Purdue’s history and includes $50 million to support the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business and $50 million for Purdue Computes, an initiative that focuses on computing, artificial intelligence and semiconductors.
The University of Chicago received a $100 million gift from an anonymous donor to support its work on behalf of free inquiry and speech, and expand the impact of its Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. Launched in 2023, the Chicago Forum’s mission is to promote free and open discourse at the university and around the world. It brings together students, faculty, higher education leaders, and other guests to discuss the challenges of free inquiry and expression and the need for those principles to be put into practice.
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) received a $100 million donation from the Brinson Foundation to create the Brinson Exploration Hub. The Hub will bring together scientists and engineers from Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA, to work on a variety of novel scientific and engineering topics, including space exploration. The projects at the new Brinson Hub will be selected through a competitive process and will focus on unresolved scientific problems with the potential to “generate scientific breakthroughs, expand human knowledge, and fundamentally transform exploration.”
The Hoax
Last year will also be remembered for one gift that turned out to be a giant hoax. After an outside investigation was launched, it was determined that a $237 million gift by Gregory Gerami to Florida A&M University, which would have been the largest in its history, was fraudulent. Gerami had announced the gift at the university’s graduation ceremonies, but after questions were raised by A&M’s board about the legitimacy of the donation, the university began to backtrack. The ensuing fallout saw the university’s president admit it was a mistake to accept the gift; he subsequently stepped down from office.