IMPLICATIONS: Dialing for Dollars

When Columbia announced the public phase of its $4 billion capital campaign last week, it officially joined the ranks of big schools raising big bucks to maintain their standing at the top of the university rankings.

Nine universities are currently running campaigns to raise at least $2 billion, and at least 23 are looking to earn at least $1 billion in the next few years. And while Columbia's current campaign goal is the highest in American university history, the school is only following the latest higher education trend: raising money for financial aid, facility improvement, and endowment building.

"[The] reality at most major research institutions is that they are always planning or are in a campaign," said Randy Holgate, the senior vice president of university resources for the University of Chicago.

Since 1994, each Ivy League school is either engaged in or has completed billion-dollar campaigns that feature extensive coordination and effort by university administrators, alumni and trustees.

Columbia's neighbor in the city, New York University, launched its own "Campaign for NYU," which has raised over $1.8 billion of a $2.5 billion goal and will last until August 2008, according to Debra LaMorte, the senior vice president for development and alumni relations at NYU.

"Last year marked the most successful fundraising year in NYU history-we raised over $390 million," LaMorte said.

Like many formal campaigns, NYU's university administrators and the alumni affairs department worked closely to pick out the goals. The school created five areas of fundraising, including faculty recruitment and retention, campus improvement, student financial aid, the school curriculum, and increasing alumni participation.

LaMorte said the emphasis on expanding the arts and science faculty is particularly critical. NYU plans to increase its arts and science faculty by 20 percent in the next few years.

Brown University's initiative, the Campaign for Academic Enrichment, kicked off last October, with an initial goal of $1.4 billion during a five year public phase, said Ron Vanden Dorpel, Brown's senior vice president for university advancement.

But Brown's campaign differs from Columbia's in many ways; most notably in scope.

"Brown is a much smaller institution than Columbia and is the smallest of the Ivy League schools," Vanden Dorpel said. Brown has 77,000 alumni worldwide, compared to Columbia's 260,000.

Like Columbia, Brown's campaign also emphasizes building a global university, reaching out to alumni in London and Hong Kong. Additionally, Brown had events at eight major U.S. cities last year and Columbia is planning to do the same.

Like most other schools, Brown is planning on budgeting funds for construction of various facilities, including a new fitness center and a life sciences building. They have been helped by numerous large donations, including a recent $120 million gift by Sidney Frank, the creator of Grey Goose vodka.

The Chicago Initiative at the University of Chicago also aims to raise $2 billion by 2008, the latest in a series of fundraising campaigns at the school since the 1980s.

The current effort focuses on supporting the faculty, new chairs and research, and faculty research, Holgate said. Plans also include several facilities projects such as the new Center of Integrative Science.

"Each campaign builds on our successes of previous campaigns, in terms of scale, the number of gifts and the number of people involved, as well as donors," Holgate said. "In each, we've also managed to engage more alumni."