“Am I therefore to become your enemy because I tell you the truth?” –St. Paul to the Galatians.
Last year I was talking with a friend who’d done well in his career and was sharing his good fortune with others through charity. His projects reached some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
He was talking about colleagues who were giving money to Harvard or Princeton and said, “Giving to Harvard or Princeton isn’t charity.”
He had a point, one that was not lost on me.
As we consider charity and philanthropy, think about the dependency of both universities and big-time college sports on “charitable” donations to run their operations.
For big-time college sports, NIL and the big money/big business model has changed the attitudes of fans and donors. Donors read the news. It’s hard for them to take us seriously when we say we need money for scholarships and facilities.
Even before ticket sales, concessions, sponsorships and merchandising, fans see annual TV deals of $1.1 billion for the Big Ten, $1.3 billion deal for the College Football Playoff and $1 billion for March Madness. They see athletic departments paying basketball coaches $5 million a year or football coaches $7 million a year or more. At some schools assistant football coaches now make more than university presidents. $30 million or more in “dead money” gets paid to buy out head coaches’ contracts.
And with pay-for-play collectives looking for a big slice of the donation pie, the pressure on university development grows. Collectives are beasts that need to be fed every year to meet an annual payroll. Nationally, “donors” to collectives are now balking at being asked to help make payroll every year.
Ultimately, the move to bring NIL collectives in-house to athletic departments may divert money from multi-media rights, sponsorships and specific NIL donations into pay-for-play funds for athletes.
With this new reality, does anyone believe that giving to big-time college athletics is philanthropy?
At smaller Division I, II or III schools where the money is tight and a donation means the ability to fund scholarships, that charitable element remains.
But for the big-name teams in the Power 5 conferences it has become transactional. Give us money and we’ll grant you access to the sidelines for games, or to watch practice or maybe even fly on the team plane.
Transactional relationships attract transactional people. The shift to transactional relationships is a cheap shortcut to real development built on genuine enduring rapport with potential donors.
And the challenges to raising money are not limited to athletics.
There is a generation rising that doesn’t feel particularly beholden to their alma mater. Once, public schools like Penn State had affordable tuition for first-generation college students. That generation felt an obligation to their alma mater.
But today’s rising generation of maturing donors and the ones who follow are populated by a lot of students that spent years paying off big student loans. They borrowed money, paid their school and then had monthly reminders for decades.
Schools have long advertised the value of college by highlighting what economists have called the “college wage premium.” The data showed that college graduates get paid significantly more than non-college graduates.
But in the past few years, researchers at the St. Louis Federal Reserve studied the “college wealth premium”—meaning the difference in accumulated wealth and assets between college graduates and non-college graduates. College graduates born before the 1980s had accumulated significantly more wealth than those who did not graduate from college.
For those graduates born in the 1980s or after, the wealth premium vanished. Those born in the 1980s are the generation of parents getting ready to send kids to college. And they are the first generation to see negligible long-term wealth benefits.
When universities look at those numbers and think 10 to 15 years ahead about engaging that generation of future donors, they’ll have a tough job.
In art we often find the seeds of bigger truths. Recently, in a stand-up comedy bit I saw a scary vision of truth.
Comedian John Mulaney had received a letter asking for a donation from the school he’d graduated from in 2004. Noting the amount of tuition money he had paid over four years, Mulaney joked, “You might say I already gave them $120,000, and now you have the audacity to ask me for more money? What kind of a cokehead relative is my college?”
Yes, it was a joke, but what stands out is the response. People laughed, but they followed up with prolonged applause. That’s the sign that a joke affirmed something bigger. Those people also saw college as a transaction.
Every development employee at every university should watch that segment and listen to the reaction. We ignore that sentiment at our peril.
Nationally, higher education is under the microscope. Media stories about on-campus events move the needle: free speech, Middle East protests, perceived bias or university spending. The shorthand perception is that we are out of step with mainstream America.
The perception is that presidents, professors, administrators and coaches are lofty elitists just collecting massive checks. The costs for those salaries are passed on to students, their families, and fans of teams. And do these same overpaid people have the audacity to ask for more money?
I’m not saying they’re right. But the truth is that perception matters, and we can no longer afford to ignore it.
