As far as Miami’s concerned, big difference between donor base and donor. And not just athletics.
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People tend to take it as a matter of faith that we have Harvard or Stanford’s alumni base. Then why is it that our endowment is slightly smaller than OU’s (747M to 686M), 40 percent of UC’s (1.77B) and less than a tenth of OSU’s (7.6B)?
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That should not be happening. My thought is MU is doing an incredibly poor job at tapping into this donor base. I know I only receive sporadic mailings. Not particularly effective.
Hell, I just want us to regularly compete with the upper tier G5 schools first!
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But the donor base that you envision is a myth. Miami has a very nice professional, upper middle class alumni base with some whales sprinkled around. That’s it, and it’s not different from around a hundred other universities in the country. It’s good, but it’s not elite. Miami is not a school that’s pumping 50 kids a year into law school at Harvard, Yale and Chicago or having Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and top Silicon VC firms banging down its door. I absolutely think Miami fundraising punches above most of the schools that it’s ranked with, but that’s different from being elite. The hard and simple proof is in our overall endowment. Or are you saying that all these wealthy Miami alums just don’t care about the school because I’ve seen them step up plenty.
I also agree with the point above that development does a good job and is well staffed and organized particularly during a campaign as is occurring presently and that it should be focused on academic issues of need such as attracting more socio-economic diversity to our student body and building up our neglected STEM departments rather than raising money to get into a bidding war with Purdue over a 3* safety.
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FWIW - Miami was ranked #20 for number of ultra wealthy alumni, defined as $30MM+, about a year and a half ago. #5 among state schools.
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Interesting article. #5 among US public universities.
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I’m curious how inheritance or the intangible value of family-related connections plays into that. When I was in school I recall the Student citing a stat that 40% of current Miami students came from a family with an annual household income above $200K per year, versus something like 5% for the US general population at the time (2012-16).
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Curious how many of the 2285 attended grad school someplace else.
An interesting question. I also wonder about something like the percentage of living graduates this represents.
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This link says 220,000 alumni. A little over 1% with a net worth over $30 million.
https://miamioh.edu/advancement/campus-partner-engagement/find-alumni/index.html
Hopefully that’s $30 million PER the 1%. (Each)
Edit - It was just one word. That’s all. It only took five seconds. Back to watching American Greed. Then Shark Tank.
Perhaps a bit relevant to the discussion: ENDOWMENT (not donation) PER STUDENT
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Yeah, not a myth. You must come from an incredibly wealthy background to think otherwise.
Well, considering that they’ve helped us build an endowment that’s less than a third (per student, not overall) what OSU has created, I’d say that they must be some of the stingiest bastards on the planet. The whales that is, not the great mass of alumni who support Miami just fine.
Amherst and Williams, D3 NESCAC colleges, both have endowments of $3.775 B and $3.53 B respectively. Both have student bodies of around 2,000. That’s an endowment of about $1.9 M per student.
The smallest endowment of the 11 NESCAC schools is Bates’ at $428 M with 1,821 students. Eight of the eleven schools in that conference have endowments exceeding $1.2 B.
I guess that’s one reason why they informally call them the Little Ivy Conference.
None have large athletics budgets.
Wait…Wait…Wait, Nescacdad. Are you daring to suggest that it might not be all about investing money into money losing athletic programs to “build a front porch” for the university upon which to sit and wait for all that sweet “Flutie Effect” cash to start flowing in?
Just saying there is a parallel universe. And btw, all these colleges have pretty solid men’s and women’s hockey programs. There are really only two divisions in hockey.
The endowments provide plenty of needs-based financial aid. Lots of talented kids with 1800-2200 SAT scores find the financial aid packages at those schools far more appealing than athletic scholarships from many D1 schools. Some kids who just miss the talent level needed for Ivy programs choose Williams, Amherst, Middlebury or another NESCAC program.
This is a DIII conference. I would argue pretty close academically to the Ivy League. I have been to a lot of basketball games. Very competitive and entertaining. More than one national champion out of this conference. Schools: Washington University, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Emory, NYU, Brandeis, University of Chicago, University of Rochester. Johns Hopkins used to be a member of the UAA. Currently 4 of the top 25 teams in DIII men’s hoops are in the UAA. Conference is comprised of like minded private research institutions. Currently, Washington University’s endowment is 13 billion dollars. I haven’t looked up the others in the UAA, but they are in the billions as well.
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Yep. Another DIII conference with very high end academics, solid athletics, and huge endowments - all over $1.2 B. WUSL - as Blues pointed out - has an absolutely huge endowment.
Athletically, in addition to solid hoops teams in the conference, Emory has national championship level baseball teams.
All are much bigger institutions than NESCAC colleges - many closer to the size of Miami and many FCS schools. NYU has 26,000 plus students.
My soon to be daughter-in-law played LAX at UChicago. They made it to the NCAA Quarterfinals.
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