Endowment Surpasses $700 million
By Mary Chamaki
University donations increased this year for the first time since the 2008 fiscal crises.
"Over the past two years we've seen a recovery from the dip that happened in our endowment," said Mike Wallace, assistant vice president for Development University Relations.
The total endowment peaked at $700 million in 2007 before the endowment rates went down to $529 million during the recession. However, the endowment once again surpassed $700 million this year, reaching $716.8 million as of June 30, 2011.
The Santa Clara Fund is the most popular fund on campus.
According to Wallace, the money in this fund is divided up and given to various sectors at the university, including student scholarships, academic programs such as the Solar Decathlon, study abroad and immersion programs, and student initiatives. Most colleges depend largely on tuition revenue and government support, but at some universities, endowment spending accounts for a substantial part of the budget.
"At Santa Clara about 75 percent of the university budget comes from tuition," said Wallace. "Interest from the endowment and gifts from alumni, families and friends of the university are critical to help cover this gap."
While Santa Clara managed to steer clear of a fiscal crises by reducing spending costs during the last couple of years, there has still been an overall downward trend for gifts made to the school each year.
"Giving of gifts has gone down over the past two years, since the downturn in the economy, the overall amount of money that we have been able to raise has decreased," said Wallace.
"That is less money we have to allocate for student scholarships and other great programs and projects across campus," said Wallace.
Although gifts have certainly decreased in recent years, "the endowment has rebounded, and we have seen a promising start to the first half of this fiscal year in terms of overall donations," said Wallace.
At a national level, college and university endowments made gains in the fiscal year that ended in June, but many are still struggling to make up the ground they lost in 2008 and 2009, according to a report released by National Association of College and University Business Officers on Tuesday.
"You hear a lot about endowments when you hear about the top schools, like Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and Yale that have typically seen huge returns on their investments certain years, but many of them were hit really hard several years ago (during the financial crises)," said Wallace.
Santa Clara, however, did not experience the same impact as some of these top schools.
Data gathered from 823 U.S. colleges and universities show that the institutions' endowments returned an average of 19.2 percent for the 2011 fiscal year, according to reports from NACUBO. This is a significant increase from 11.9 percent in the 2010 fiscal year.
Still, NACUBO President John Walda said 47 percent of the institutions have endowment market values below what they had reported in 2008.
Harvard University had the largest endowment of any U.S. university at $31.7 billion, up from $27.5 billion in fiscal year 2010. Yale was second with $19.4 billion. At the other end of the scale were colleges with small endowments like Pennsylvania's Keystone College, granted with $7.1 million.
Contact Mary Chamaki at mchamaki@scu.edu or call (408) 554-4849. Karen Matthews of the Associated Press contributed to this report.