Has the Golden Age of Giving Ended?

Colleges Will See a Decline in Megagifts, Experts Predict

By Kathryn Masterson

San Francisco

The golden age for philanthropy—and the United States—may be over.

That was the sobering message delivered late last week at the annual conference for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Speakers at the fund-raising conference, including Robert B. Reich, a former U.S. secretary of labor, predicted that the economic recovery, when it happens, is likely to be weak, and that the number of megagifts to higher education will probably fall and the pace of such giving slow.

Major changes are necessary in how campaigns are conducted to meet the challenges of the future, the more than 400 fund raisers and alumni-affairs officers in attendance were told. Yet the message was still optimistic: Philanthropy is not going away, and fund-raising programs that can adapt to the changing environment and redeploy their resources accordingly will continue to raise significant amounts of money.

Megagifts are not going to disappear entirely. In fact, New York University’s Langone Medical Center announced a $100-million gift to its Langone Medical Center the day before the conference started. And fund raisers at the meeting said donors are feeling less skittish than they were in the fall and early part of this year.

Bruce R. McClintock, chair of the consulting group Marts & Lundy, and Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for resource development at Rice University, told an audience that they expected the number of gifts at the $5-million-and-above mark to decrease from the high seen in recent years, when home prices and the stock market peaked. Many of the biggest fund-raising programs __concentrated their resources at the top because pursuing the donors who could make megagifts had the biggest return on investment.

Read More