In the spirit of reliving Alumni Weekend (and the previous post,) I thought I’d talk some more about alumni donations, because that is the only reason Babson cares about their alums. That’s also the reason they should care about current students, but obviously they don’t see the correlation. (Happy students = more alumni donations)

It’s funny some of the students I talk to. The majority say they will never donate anything back to Babson, and a few say they will only donate if they can ensure that it goes to student activities.

Why is that? Because the administrators don’t seem to care about student activities. Or maybe it’s just OCL, I don’t know. But somewhere in there, students get neglected! (Hence that lengthy post about lack of community…)

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Since it’s alumni weekend, I thought I would dedicate a blog in its favor, and dream about the day when Babson will be a distance and still not-so-fond memory. In fact, I’ve been hearing a lot about the Babson phone-a-thon and our financial issues at the school. More specifically, Babson’s administration is constantly complaining about how alumni don’t donate money back to the school when they graduate and become successful. The “phone-a-thon,” for those unfamiliar with it, pays Babson students to sit in an office and cold-call alumni to try and finagle a few bucks for the school.

So while I thought about the concept of the phone-a-thon, it crossed my mind that one day someone is going to cold-call me and ask me to donate my money to Babson. Then I felt something wet on my cheek and realized that I was laughing myself to tears about the prospect of donating even a single penny back to this organization. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but it’s actually a reality for Babson since they have a very hard time trying to get alumni donations. In fact, it’s probably the single biggest problem facing the finance department at Babson. Why? Because believe it or not, our school’s budget this year was covered about 83% by tuition costs. To put that another way, only 17% of the costs Babson will incur this year is covered by alumni donations, either through periodic donations or contributions to the endowment (which is a fund that earns a return, and the college withdraws a chunk of money each year from the fund that is hopefully just less than the return they make).

A big part of the reason for this is the fact that alumni, on average, donate $60k back to Babson. Other schools get average donations of even $650k and more! That’s more than ten times as much!!! Not to mention some of those schools have ten times as many students as we have. So you would think that if one alumnus donated a few million, they would have a lot more people to spread it out over, which would make the average lower. Compare this to our school, and one donation of a few million would be spread out over far fewer people, which should make our average higher than normal. So our crappy $60k donation average is even worse when you think about that.

So the questions are why is this the case and what is to be done? Well, if you’ve ever seen our Babson Strategic Plan, which can be found on the school’s web site, you might notice that the administration claims they are committed to providing not only academic excellence, but also a strong feeling of community. I’ll pause here for a minute so you can let that sink in…

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