| Black
Colleges Seeking More Financial Support From Alumni
By
DIONNE WALKER
The Associated Press
ETTRICK,
Va. (AP) — Making money, administrators at
Virginia State University have learned, takes money. The
majority black school has spent millions of state dollars
renovating buildings, partly to heighten school pride among
alumni they hope will respond by opening their own wallets.
It's working: Alumni
support has risen from 7 percent five years ago to 10 percent,
and individual gifts have increased from hundreds of dollars
to thousands, development vice president Robert Turner said
as he showed off libraries and academic buildings recently.
"This"
— Turner said, surveying the hilltop campus —
"obviously converts to good will."
As state
and private funds shrink, historically black colleges are
refreshing outdated efforts to solicit former students, by
adding specialized staff, crafting personalized "asks,"
improving campuses and increasingly using Internet outreach.
They're
targeting a wider base — more blacks are graduating
— and younger alumni who've moved into a broader range
of careers. At
VSU, efforts as subtle as adding a donor recognition dinner
have heartened alumni like Anthony Spence.
"If
I'm going to give my money to a university, I want to be sure
that it's used for the very best," said Spence, 41, a
Miramar, Fla., entrepreneur who's given about $60,000.
Administrators
plan computer network upgrades devoted to online giving at
Atlanta's prestigious Morehouse College, where alumni contributions
dipped from about $3.1 million in 2006 to $1.3 million last
year.
Wiley
College in east Texas will use a nearly $840,000 grant from
the United Negro College Fund to help scout 200 major gift
prospects a year, create new online giving opportunities and
beef up staff.
Wiley,
featured in Denzel Washington's 2007 film "The Great
Debaters," has nine staffers focused on institutional
advancement.
"At
some of the larger, predominant institutions, they may have
an advancement staff of say 20, 30, 50 people," said
Karen Helton, vice president for institutional advancement.
"That's how the Harvards and the Stanfords and the UCLAs
generate billions."
Such measures
are commonplace at some mainstream institutions. But they
represent a major investment for the nation's more than 100
historically black colleges and universities, whose resources
often are stretched.
The fundraising
push by these schools foreshadows an expected slowdown in
levels of state higher education funding, at the same time
that predominantly white universities are pushing harder to
attract high-achieving black students.
"There
is an urgency about this as we look at our network of institutions
and look at trying to sustain them," said Elfred Pinkard,
executive director of the Institute for Capacity Building,
part of the United Negro College Fund that represents 39 private
historically black schools.
Since
2006, the institute has granted more than $8.1 million to
29 member schools for projects that include increasing alumni
support.
"There
was a recognition that alum of these institutions represented
a very important constituency that had not been tapped in
any systematic way," Pinkard said.
The colleges,
founded to serve blacks during segregation, have kept tuition
low to help underprivileged students. That leaves little extra
cash for things like fundraising, said University of Pennsylvania
assistant professor Marybeth Gasman, author of "Supporting
Alma Mater: Successful Strategies for Securing Funds from
Black College Alumni."
They also
have historically been reluctant to ask former students, already
paying off loans, to give more money. At the same time, black
alumni haven't always had the income of graduates from predominantly
white schools, Gasman said.
"Their
alumni have had more access to income, to assets, and thus
could give back," Gasman said, adding that blacks also
tend to give more to churches.
But at
Norfolk State University, alumni giving has grown from 2 percent
to 8.2 percent since 2000, nudged, officials say, by graduates
who are more moneyed at younger ages.
"As
we get some of the majors that we have now, for example the
optical engineering, there are individuals leaving college
with decent salaries," said Phillip Adams, interim vice
president for university advancement.
And there
are potentially more of them: 142,420 bachelor's degrees were
conferred to blacks in 2005-2006, up from fewer than 92,000
a decade earlier, according to the National Center for Education
Statistics.
But among
black colleges' top resources, say some, is alumni loyalty.
"Many
of our alum respond to our institutions as providing an opportunity
when many other institutions would not have. So they give
back," Pinkard said.
|
Email
This Article To A Friend
