WEEKEND EDITION
December 11 - 12, 2004
UNLV:
UNR:
UNLV could use more alumni like George Maloof Jr.
The president and owner of the Palms began his career in hotels as a student at UNLV's Harrah College of Hotel Administration.
And the 1988 graduate showed his thanks for that education by opening his wallet last year.
"I just feel it's important to give back," Maloof said of his $1 million pledge, which will be given to the Harrah College and to the UNLV football team over a few years.
"I had some of the best training going to school there in the hotel school, and I got to play football there.
"I think it's important as an alumnus to support your school if you believe in it and if you have the means."
The problem, UNLV officials said, is that most of the alumni do not yet have the means.
In UNLV's ongoing scramble to bring in more outside dollars -- a long-term mission interim Chancellor Jim Rogers has brought to the forefront in recent months -- university development officers say alumni pocketbooks are the most difficult to open.
The relative youth of the university and its small alumni base make soliciting donations a challenge, development officers said. Despite recent increases in giving, the percentage of alumni who give back and the amount they give places UNLV in the lowest percentile for alumni giving among other doctoral-granting institutions in the West, according to a 2003 survey by the Council for Aid to Education.
Only 8.5 percent, or 4,900, of the 57,000-plus alumni gave back to UNLV in the 2003-2004 fiscal year. Alumni gifts accounted for about $1.7 million of the total $29.1 million the UNLV Foundation brought in from outside donors, according to John Gallagher, UNLV vice president for development and director of the foundation.
And 95 percent of that money was donated by 5 percent of the alumni, or by people like Maloof who own successful businesses and have the ability to make big donations, Gallagher said.
The university recently received two "seven-figure" pledges from alumni, Gallagher said, but the average donation per alumnus is $204. Most of the university's private fundraising comes from the business sector.
UNR had a slightly lower alumni giving rate than UNLV with 6.5 percent, or 3,300 alumni, donating in fiscal year 2004, according to John K. Carothers, interim vice president for development and alumni relations. But that small percentage raised more than $5 million for the university through a major campaign for the library's new Knowledge Center. Several big donors spurred the campaign.
In the previous four years, 7 percent to 9 percent of UNR alumni donated from $1.2 million to almost $1.9 million annually.
Alumni giving is necessary to supplement state funds at the two public institutions because the state only pays for about one-third of the operating budgets at both universities, school officials said. The remainder comes from tuition, research grants and private dollars.
Alumni giving goes to any number of places, including general operating expenses and scholarships. Others, often the big gifts, go toward building projects or specific needs.
Alumni giving accounts for more than 20 percent of UNR's total private fundraising, whereas UNLV graduates contribute less than 6 percent of the total raised at their alma mater.
Both Nevada universities are working to increase their alumni giving rate, and Gallagher said UNLV is aiming for at least 15 percent of alumni to participate each year.
That's the benchmark for public universities, Gallagher said, but the UNLV's young age is making reaching that goal a long, steep hill to climb.
More than half of the institution's alumni graduated in the last 10 years and are still trying to establish themselves in their careers or are trying to start families, said Russel Kost, associate vice president of alumni relations and development. Many are still paying back college loans.
The university itself is only 47 years old, young by higher education standards, Kost said. There are few retirement-age alumni, who often are more able to give. That's the classic demographic of a donor, university officials said.
The institution's young age also means there are far fewer graduates to solicit money from, Kost said.
Alumni, however, are the "bedrock that financial support will come from in the long run," UNLV Alumni Association President Jim Kirkwood said.
UNLV officials are doing everything they can to cultivate their alumni base for potential donors.
Kirkwood, 52, gives money to the Alumni Association, the business college he graduated from, and to the athletic department through the purchase of season football and basketball tickets. He said it is in each graduate's best interest to do whatever they can to help UNLV.
"The way I see it, the better the university gets the better my degree gets," said Kirkwood, a 1983 graduate in business administration who is now director of finance at Binion's Horseshoe. "The more prestige that our university has the more prestige attached to our degrees."
Kirkwood, whose son also graduated from UNLV, said he believes alumni giving will grow as the school ages and builds those second- and third-generation ties to the university.
In the meantime, many of UNLV's graduates are gaining prominence in the business community, Kirkwood said, and are "driving the company involvement we see today."
One major donation the university received from two of its younger alumni was $180,000 in Ryder Cup prize money from former UNLV golfers Chad Campbell and Chris Riley, Harter said. The PGA donates a portion of the money raised through the tournament each year to the school of a player's choice.
But most of the university's major alumni donors are its older graduates.
Alberta Stern, 78, a 1965 business alumna of UNLV, said she encouraged two of her daughters and now one of her grandsons to attend the university because she and her late husband believed in supporting and attending the educational institution in one's own community.
Stern donated $10,000 to UNLV in the early 1990s. Five years ago she established a $250,000 endowment to provide scholarships for Boyd School of Law students in honor of her husband, William. Two of their daughters were forced to go to law school out of state in the 1980s because there wasn't one in Nevada at the time, Stern said.
"(Boyd Law School Dean) Dick Morgan has done a fantastic job to have built that law school from nothing," Stern said. "I think any money that is put into education is well invested."
The average alumni donation rate at the nation's top 50 public institutions is about 18 percent, according to data gathered in the U.S. News & World Report's 2005 Best Colleges edition. The rates among the Top 50 public universities range from a high of 37 percent at the University of Alabama to a low of 5 percent at the University of California, Riverside.
The average was 8 percent among the universities ranked in the bottom of the list with UNLV, with some institutions having an alumni giving at a rate of less than 1 percent.
U.S. News uses alumni giving as one of its factors in ranking colleges nationwide, with the rationale that students who are satisfied with their experience in college will give back financially.
But that isn't always a fair assessment, both local and national higher education officials say.
The alumni-iving rate may go down even though alumni donations are going up because of the large increases in the numbers of graduates, education officials said. Students at public institutions also may not give because they think their taxes are enough.
University officials are trying to encourage alumni donations by ingraining into students the idea that their education was made possible by the donations and time of those who walked before them, Kost said.
Alumni are being encouraged to volunteer more on UNLV advisory boards and for university events to encourage more face-to-face interaction with students and get them thinking about what it means to be a graduate of UNLV, Kost said. At the beginning of this semester, the alumni association ran part of UNLV's student orientation.
"The first time they (students) heard about us previously was when they were walking out the door. Now they hear about alumni, support and involvement when they first walk in as students," said Kost, who graduated from UNLV with a communications degree in 1983.
The alumni association is also supporting student services and activities more because national studies show that students who are more involved in their institution during the college years are more likely to stay involved and donate to the institution after graduation, Kost said.
If students have an emotional tie to the university, they are more likely to give, Kost said, and UNLV is limited in developing those ties because of its commuter campus.
Because most students live off campus, there's less of a tie to the university than at schools that have a large on-campus housing population.
Most alumni give back to what they were involved in during their college years and typically restrict their giving to a particular purpose, university officials said. Athletics at UNLV receives more than one-third of all alumni gifts.
Kost said the university is pushing to bring alumni to campus to interact with students so that the alumni can see what the university is doing and become aware of the university's needs.
Both UNLV and UNR charge alumni a fee to be a part of the alumni associations to be able to sponsor more events to draw other alumni back into the university, officials said.
"I think the alumni association has done a good job reaching out to the students," said former Rep. Jim Bilbray, a founder of the UNLV Alumni Association. "We just need to do more reaching out to people and letting them know how they can be involved."
Gallagher estimates that the university hosts about 100 events a year, ranging from small lunches to major fundraisers such as UNLVino. The increased programming has improved alumni giving, he said.
Alumni giving was consistently under $100,000 prior to 1988 and increased slightly in the early 1990s, averaging $200,000 to $300,000 a year, Gallagher said.
But since 1998, when development officials "ramped up" alumni-targeted fundraising efforts, the annual alumni giving rate has averaged between $1.2 million to $2 million each year, Gallagher said.
As UNLV continues to work on upping its alumni giving rate, development officials stressed the need to continue to sell the university to nonalumni in the business community and to continue efforts to bring in more research dollars.
Ann Kaplan, director of the Council for Aid to Education's national survey, said it's important for universities to put their efforts toward the donors who have the greatest capacity to give.
The pressure to have good alumni participation, especially because of the U.S. News ranking, often leads universities to sacrifice other fundraising efforts on the "altar of alumni giving," Kaplan said.
John W. Welty, vice president for information services and annual donations at the University of Arizona, said his institution saw fewer than 5 percent of its alumni give in 2003. That university focuses on private donors and research dollars over alumni donations.
"You have to play with the cards you're dealt," Welty said.
Even Rogers, who has pushed for Nevada's institutions to bring in more outside dollars, agrees that fundraising efforts are best spent on the business sector.
"UNLV is so young, only 47 years old, so the alums are not the ones who give the big bucks, it's the businesspeople," said Rogers, a University of Arizona alumnus and a major donor to both his alma mater and Nevada's university system.
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