Alumni Fund: Dollars up, participation down

In its 71st year, the Dartmouth Alumni Fund raised $11.4 million, up $1 million or 9.3 percent from last year's campaign. The Alumni Fund contributes 16 percent to the annual operating budget. While the participation rate for the Alumni Fund did not go up in 1985, Dartmouth has in recent years achieved the highest rate of alumni giving for any major college or university in the world. Although down 1.4 percentage points from last year, a nevertheless impressive 66.5 percent of alumni gave to the 1985 Alumni Fund.

"We're very pleased that we raised a million dollars more than last year," said Elizabeth Roberts '79, associate director of the Fund. She said while there was some disappointment that the participation figure did not reach last year's level, "it has gone up every year for the past ten years. You have to realize," she noted, "that we need to get more people every year just to stay at the same percentage, because the alumni body is getting larger every year."

Setting the lead for the 1985 Fund were two classes with totals of over $1 million - 1935, which raised $1,048,600, and 1960, with $1,011,600. Two components of the Fund that were up over last year were matching gifts and donations from parents. Last year matching gifts accounted for $1.4 million of the Fund total; this year the figure was $1.6 million. And the Parents Fund raised $528,000, or $26,000 more than in 1984.

An arena in which Dartmouth also outstrips other colleges' annual funds is in the number of class agents. Roberts said Dartmouth can claim about 4,500 solicitors. She called the figure "impressive," saying it is probably more than at any other college or university.

There are also three other annual funds mounted at Dartmouth one at each of the three professional schools. "The Thayer School of Engineering, the Tuck School of Business, and the Dartmouth Medical School are essentially financially independent from Dartmouth College," explained Thayer development director Susan Kastan. "We all have our own budgets and endowments, which is part of the rationale for independent annual funds at each of the associated schools." She pointed to the fact that all three schools are drawing significantly increasing percentages of their student bodies from colleges other than Dartmouth as another reason for the professional schools to campaign separately. At Thayer, for example, before the sixties, only two to three percent of the graduate students had earned their bachelor's degrees someplace other than Dartmouth; now the figure is 60 percent. Kastan explained that a separate campaign is necessary so that 60 percent "doesn't get left out of the family."

The most established of the three professional school campaigns, Tuck's, just completed its 14th year with a total of $772,000 and 60.1 percent participation. Andrew Steele, director of alumni affairs at Tuck, said as far as he knows, Tuck is the first business school in the nation to break 60 percent participation. Most other business schools range between 25 and 50 percent participation.

The national record for alumni participation at a medical institution is also set at Dartmouth. Alumni annual giving is only a small part of the Medical School's development effort, which also relies on foundation and corporate grants and on an extensive regional campaign. But 63.5 percent of DMS alumni gave $125,000 to the 1985 annual fund. "The last time we checked," said Barbara Blough, director of alumni affairs at the Med School, "our nearest competitor was Harvard, which was a full ten percentage points behind us." The Medical School began its alumni annual fund nine years ago.

The Thayer School, which started its annual fund in 1977, this year raised $105,000 with 41 percent participation. This marks what Kastan called "a healthy improvement in participation over past years." Currently, the Thayer annual fund is an important component of a comprehensive capital campaign to raise $17.5 million to incease faculty, students, and facilities. Kastan noted that this is the first capital campaign Thayer has ever mounted, but that over the past ten years the school's endowment has increased from about $1 million to $8 million.