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By the numbers: Michigan's $5 billion fundraiser highlights education inequities

Michigan University's campus
University of Michigan campus. Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

The University of Michigan raised $5 billion in private funding over 5 years through a campaign to further finance the university, writes Douglas Belkin of The Wall Street Journal.

Why it matters: Michigan's ability to raise billions of dollars from donors' private funds highlights an imbalance in the playing field for most universities. Only private universities and big-name public schools have the funds available to employ this strategy. Smaller, regional public schools tend to be left behind.

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By the numbers

The country's flagship universities benefit the most from donors. Most of the money comes from a few wealthy donors with the top 1% of donors giving 79% of funds to universities in 2015. That number was just 64% in 2006.

  • The concentration of donor wealth is similar to the concentration of the recipients, Belkin writes.
  • "You have public research universities launching multibillion-dollar campaigns and in the same state you’ll have small schools that have never had a fundraising campaign," Dr. Kevin McClure, an assistant professor on higher education at UNC, told Belkin.

This isn't a new phenomenon, Belkin writes. "Fundraising was baked into the business model of most private colleges and universities more than a century ago," but after the recession.

Michigan continues a trend that developed over the last few decades with universities reaching into the pockets of their alumni and they aren't the only school that has adopted this strategy.

Be smart: The only options for struggling universities are to either raise tuition or wait on state funding to save them, but public education funding hasn't been raised in years.

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