Money won’t keep us from changing leagues
Who knew?
I see this cited frequently, but folks rarely go on to provide the context that we have a poor track record of getting alums to actually give part of that wealth to the university for anything, let alone the toy department. Miami University’s endowment ranks 62nd among American public universities.
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62nd in endowment of all public universities in the United States is still some pretty tall cotton. When you say Miami has done a poor job soliciting contributions from wealthy alums who do you consider Miami’s peers to be?
Forgive my ignorance but I was dumbfound at the news of alumni wealth. I thought we probably punched above our weight but little more. Miami has been a strong regional brand for years but the general public associates us with Ohio, Toledo , BG, Ball State etc because that’s the company we keep IMHO. I dare say the vast majority of alums think of us the same way. Unfortunately that’s become our perception of ourselves too. We have been content as an institution to accept our lot in life without recognizing the potential at our command. I wonder how many of these wealthy alums have even been courted? It can be intimidating contacting people in “high places” when your perception of yourself is so stunted.
A realistic comparison might be William & Mary, which is a similarly situated public institution that we used to consider a peer back in the “public ivy” days. Its endowment is roughly 50% larger than ours. While W&M does have a law school that may help drive more high-dollar donors, the rest of its profile is pretty similar to Miami’s.
University of Delaware might be another place to look for lessons learned. It has a $2 billon endowment. It’s the state flagship, but a flagship in a really small place. It’s similar in size to Miami and doesn’t have a law school or med school, although it probably has some big donors from the chemical industry situated in Wilmington.
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Miami is also fairly small compared to a lot of schools in terms of students. Our endowment is about half the size of UC but we have nearly 1/3rd the amount of students
The biggest driver of differences between Miami’s and UC’s endowments is probably their medical school. Universities with medical schools tend to attract more donations (and grants) than those that don’t. I am intentionally looking for peer public institutions with academic offerings more similar to Miami’s because I think that’s where the lessons lie in better tapping a well-off alumni base. I also would disregard outliers like the second-tier Texas institutions since even they benefit from the state’s oil royalties fund for education.
I avoided comparisons to private institutions because that’s just a different animal. They’ve been doing this a lot longer than the public schools, and the mindset is miles ahead. The level of donor cultivation at my other two schools is a lot more intense than Miami’s, and that’s even though I don’t have undergraduate ties there.
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From Miami BOT Report: “University’s billion dollar fundraising campaign — now exceeding $830 million raised over the past decade — has been largely dedicated to academics, with an estimated 85% of funds directed toward academic priorities, more than $700 million. The university’s endowment has also grown from $465 million to over $1.2 billion over the last decade, with the majority of endowment payouts targeted to support academic programs, scholarships, and academic initiatives.”
Not bad.
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I often wondered who decided we would concentrate on undergraduate education to the exclusion of all professional degrees. It’s like we decided to stay in the shallow end of the pool and purposely decided to stunt our growth. That concentration in undergraduate education has no doubt negatively affected donations to the endowment fund. I wonder if any public university with a larger endowment fund than Miami so doggedly concentrated on undergraduate education as we did.
Did Miami choose this course or was it imposed upon us by the state?
Largely the latter. There is lore that Miami and UC were both considered for a medical school, but the general assembly (probably correctly) opted to fund academic medicine in a larger town than Oxford. Law schools weren’t big money-spinners for a long time, and if you go all the way back many of them were standalone night schools (like Salmon P. Chase, which is now part of NKU). Philosophically, I think every good state university system ought to have an option to get an education at state school prices with a liberal arts college look and feel. That has been our historic niche, but it has some drawbacks when it comes to building a base of alumni giving.
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I read Dr. Shriver’s Miami history book during COVID, I believe we tried/failed to get state funding for a law school after the Civil War. Also OSU successfully lobbied the state legislature in the early 1900s to obtain exclusive rights to offer graduate degrees among Ohio public universities, it wasn’t repealed until around WWII.
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UC was free to start a medical school (amd law school) because they were, at the time, an independent municipal college not under state control.
Miami was governed by a law from the late 1800s or early 1900s that barred Miami, OU, BG and KSU from having doctoral programs and professional schools as well as conducting basic research. That stood until the 1960s.
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