Vassar gets $27 million in gifts

Juliana Kiyan Assistant News Editor

Vassar’s fundraising efforts for 2005 totaled $27 million, as reported by the Council for Aid to Education (CAE). When College President Fran Fergusson announced a year ago that she would complete her twentieth and final term as College President in June 2006, the Development Office decided to adjust the timing of the next fundraising campaign.

The CAE reported Vassar as having received $27,397,787 in private donations last year, which Director of Development for Principal and Leadership Gifts Jennifer Dahnert said is comparable to figures from past years. Vassar’s fundraising program encompasses a myriad of sources, including alumnae/i, parents, friends of the College, foundations, corporations, and pledged contributions.

Focusing on a fundraising endeavor for Fergusson, the Office reset the starting date for counting gifts toward its next campaign to July 2005, when it was originally planned for July 2004. “Vassar finished strong [for 2005], meeting the goal established for the year with the annual fund,” said Dahnert. “The year before, we didn’t quite make it.”

Gifts last year included approximately $4 million for the Kenyon Hall dance performance space and a Picasso art piece worth $2 million, given by a Boston alumna in Fergusson’s name. The $860,000 gift from an anonymous donor for a campus-wide wireless Internet network is not a part of the $27 million; it will be accounted for in 2006 figures.

The funds were directed to a number of projects on campus, notably ongoing dorm overhaul with focus on the multi-purpose rooms, endowments for scholarships, and the Kenyon Hall renovation and addition, which is nearing completion and will be rededicated this spring.

This summer, work will be done on the Josselyn House lobby and parlor as a result of support from several donors.

“About $7.8 million of the contributions go to the annual fund, which is the College’s operating support and accounts for seven percent of the College’s budget,” said Dahnert. “This was all spent in 2005.”

Need-based Vassar scholarships are also almost entirely drawn from the endowment fund or gifts.

Vice President for Finance and Administration Betsy Eismeier sent out a letter on Feb. 24 to students and parents, which discussed approval by the College’s Board of Trustees of the capital budget for the 2006-2007 academic year, “financed primarily by sources other than tuition and fees, especially the generosity of many Vassar donors.”

The CAE’s findings come from the annual Voluntary Support of Education survey, which tracks donations to both higher education and private K-12 schools. The CAE reported that private donations to colleges and universities in 2005 was up by 4.9 percent, to $25.6 billion overall.

In a Feb. 16 press release, the director of the CAE survey Ann E. Kaplan said that although voluntary support has accounted for a small percentage of expenditures, it “is an important component of higher education funding…some types of institutions, notably private liberal arts institutions, rely much more on voluntary support than do institutions overall.”