ND certainly has loyal alumni who evidently value greatly the education and overall experience at being at the school. I can also tell you that Notre Dame makes a strong effort to keep in touch with its alums through a good alumni magazine and through offers of tours to foreign countries. (My girlfriend is the widow of an ND alum -- by the way, someone who hated the place.) My alma mater, Cal, does a reasonable job of doing this; just this week I got a call from a nice-sounding student soliciting money, and I gave because I feel grateful that Berkeley gave me an education -- and not just in the classroom. But RU seems not to inspire such feelings among its alum and students.
N.J. couple donates $20M to Notre Dame
- Thread starter MidwestKnights
- Start date
ND certainly has loyal alumni who evidently value greatly the education and overall experience at being at the school. I can also tell you that Notre Dame makes a strong effort to keep in touch with its alums through a good alumni magazine and through offers of tours to foreign countries. (My girlfriend is the widow of an ND alum -- by the way, someone who hated the place.) My alma mater, Cal, does a reasonable job of doing this; just this week I got a call from a nice-sounding student soliciting money, and I gave because I feel grateful that Berkeley gave me an education -- and not just in the classroom. But RU seems not to inspire such feelings among its alum and students.
part of the problem here is that people erroneously think that public universities are so fully backed by state governments that they really don't need donations, while private universities have no such backing.
If that's the case then the RU Development office has done a very poor job with communications. I don't think the graduates of Michigan, UVA, UNC etc. are operating under that delusion.
The message that public funds aren't enough is a hard message to get across --even at a time when Rutgers' state support is sinking in real dollars. I understand this from people at Berkeley, which has had severe budget cuts.
it is tough to compare a 12,000 student private school in rural Indiana vs. a 60,000 student state school where 1/3 of the students can potentially commute if they chose.
Both schools have a niche:
Notre Dame - strong ties to the Catholic church and Irish community to garner support from those groups who do not attend.
Rutgers - is the State school in NJ so every state resident has a tie to the school.
I wonder if RU gets a higher % of alums donating that were out of state students vs. those who were NJ residents. I knew a couple of students as an undergrad from NY, Conn, Indiana, Michigan, and even 1 from Calif. I wonder if those types of students tend to donate at a higher % then the rest who were less than an hour away in NJ.
Both schools have a niche:
Notre Dame - strong ties to the Catholic church and Irish community to garner support from those groups who do not attend.
Rutgers - is the State school in NJ so every state resident has a tie to the school.
I wonder if RU gets a higher % of alums donating that were out of state students vs. those who were NJ residents. I knew a couple of students as an undergrad from NY, Conn, Indiana, Michigan, and even 1 from Calif. I wonder if those types of students tend to donate at a higher % then the rest who were less than an hour away in NJ.
The problem is that most of our alumni are young yet. RU gave it's 250,000th degree in 1990. We have 500,000ish living alumni now. As time goes by, we will get more money because our alumni base will be older and wealthier.
Also historically, the school has also done a bad job of reaching out to students during school and after graduation to solicit donations as well.
That said, there is an NJ.com article on this already that is actually a good read. I found out I have give dear old Rutgers more than Calista Flockhart ($2,650) lol.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2014/09/big_ten_why_is_rutgers_behind_in_the_fundraising_game.html
Also historically, the school has also done a bad job of reaching out to students during school and after graduation to solicit donations as well.
That said, there is an NJ.com article on this already that is actually a good read. I found out I have give dear old Rutgers more than Calista Flockhart ($2,650) lol.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2014/09/big_ten_why_is_rutgers_behind_in_the_fundraising_game.html
Actually, the takeaway from that article, written in 2014, is that Rutgers "recently" began to hire outside consultants to identify and help the RU development office begin to cultivate those potential donors. As the son and grandson of college and university fund raising counsellors (I took a different path) let me just state for the record that private schools have been doing this for close to a century, and public universities got into the practice shortly after World War II ended. I understand the 50's were an administratively unsettled time for the university, but it is almost criminal that RU didn't begin similar efforts in the 60's or 70's. Then they only would have been 20 years behind UNC, UVA and Michigan. I know this because my father did a consulting job for Michigan Law School in the early 70's.
I also think the demographics issue has been overstated. The class of 1990 is now 47, and there are at least 100,000 grads older than that.
All of those schools were actually founded as state institutions, and were early to realize the limitations of state underwriting, whereas Rutgers's "takeover" by the state in the late 40s was seen as a "it's your baby, now" event for alumni.
When you say that the development office has done a "poor job of communications," I wonder if you've ever been a telemarketer for the Scarlet R or the Foundation. Most people hang up the phone before you get the "-gers" out of your mouth, following the "Rut-". It's not an easy job, and alumni don't want to hear about it. Everybody's got a reason for not being a donor, and while the development office hasn't exactly been a model of excellence or efficiency, all you have to do is read this board to gauge the reception the audience is willing to provide them -- I'm not talking about whether or not the people on this board are donors to Rutgers; ask yourself what it's like trying to alter prejudices and strongly, wrongly held convictions around here.
Perceptions often lag reality--badly. There WAS a time when state legislatures lavished money on higher education. Couple that with the fact that everyone agrees higher education is key to economic success in the future and you get a situation where most Americans would probably be shocked to hear that aid to universities only goes down over time.
Are people bringing up donations as it relates to the football program and the reason we can't compete? One main reason we will never compete on the top level of the Big Ten is the size of the stadiums. Mich, Penn State and Ohio State have 100,000 seat stadiums which has twice the number of fans . 50,000 fans x $600 revenue per seat=$30,000,000 more per season. These teams can spend $30,000,000 more every year.
I posted immediately above yours explaining my background. The annual giving campaigns are just one part, and not the most vital part, of what a development office should be doing. You don't bring in $10 million gifts via a phone bank, though they can keep the school's name in the mind of future large donors. And believe it or not, the phone bank volunteers for Harvard, UNC, UVA and Stanford get hung up on just like RU's. But without the long term cultivation of major donors, RU will always lag behind the more successful schools.
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