In 1638, , an English-born Puritan minister and teacher in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, bequeathed 400 books and half his £779 estate, today equivalent to roughly US$2 million, to the college that would be renamed in his honor after his death.

In addition to launching America’s oldest university, Harvard’s donation began a tradition of philanthropy for U.S. colleges and universities that has continued ever since. Today, philanthropy is an important source of higher education funding that covers an average of .

decades of , academic administrators and , we believe that donors – and not just big ones – are especially important to colleges and universities in tough times.

In the crosshairs

Since January 2025, the Trump administration has targeted colleges and universities with , and new restrictions on how .

University endowments have been in the crosshairs since the first Trump administration’s . The big 2025 tax-and-spending package Trump signed raised . A rule the Trump administration proposed in September 2026 would threaten if any of their programs use race-based criteria.

There are demographic problems too. Fewer students are choosing to go to college, and the is falling due to a .

Although colleges and universities are providing , students and their families are still struggling to .

Some schools are being forced to close their doors. , including Indiana’s only predominantly Black college, Martin University, and ecologically focused Sterling College in Vermont.

And at least by other schools since 2020, including and , which are now part of Northeastern University’s global network.

A sticky note spotted at Hampshire College’s Harold F. Johnson Library on May 16, 2026, months before the school was slated to be closed for good, assured students that alumni would support them.

Higher education giving

to colleges and universities in 2025, up 4% in constant dollars from the year before.

dominate giving to higher education: in 2025.

Also in 2025, Phil and Penny Knight, the Nike co-founder and his wife, made what was then the largest single gift to a university in history when they gave the .

On Sept. 30, 2026, investor Ken Griffin broke that record by giving to build a new campus in Miami and meet some other priorities.

It’s hardly the only megagift a university has received in 2026: Michael and Susan Dell, whose fortune comes from his computer hardware company, gave the for its medical center. The to the University of Oregon for a new engineering college. Software billionaire . And many other schools have drawn .

The vast majority of these huge gifts are . The share of totally , those given with no strings attached, has been . . Unrestricted giving . Perhaps that was a sign that some donors were responding to federal funding cuts with their gifts.

Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computer, and his wife Susan have given more than $1 billion to the University of Texas at Austin, with much of that funding reserved for specific purposes.

How donors can help

In an article in in September 2026, we listed ideas for college and university fundraising efforts. These tie to three recommendations for donors – and not only those making multimillion-dollar gifts.

1. Pooling donations

Donations to colleges and universities don’t have to end in lots of zeros to make a big difference.

In 2015, the grassroots campaign kept the small women’s college operating even after its trustees had voted to close it. The largest gift the rural Virginia school received was $2 million, and the smallest was $1.50 from a graduate’s grandchild. This is the exception rather than the rule. Financial pressures were too much for Hampshire College, a New England private college of 2026, to withstand – even with a fundraising campaign and $5 million gift from alum and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.

are high-profile fundraising campaigns through which many alumni and other supporters raise millions. For example, Oregon State University drew 12,400 gifts and raised over $4.1 million. has generated nearly $500 million over the past decade. In 2024, it garnered $76 million from 32,000 donors.

Sweet Briar College alumni take a selfie in 2015 at a pop-up fundraiser to save the womens’ college in Virginia.

2. Donating with few or no strings attached

Donations with few restrictions or none at all help colleges and universities meet their greatest needs.

Even if they’re mostly intended for a new building or to fund a particular program, to help cover costs as needs arise and priorities change.

, , and other schools encourage unrestricted annual gifts. These flexible funds are helping to cover at Cornell University, at Georgetown University and at the College of the Atlantic.

Novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has to nonprofits, including to colleges and universities. as well as other , such as Robeson Community College in rural North Carolina, Oklahoma’s Carl Albert State College and Wisconsin’s Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, have received Scott’s big gifts.

In 1920, the trustees of Berea College, a private liberal arts school in Kentucky, placing future unrestricted bequests, donations made through people’s estates, in the school’s endowment. Berea students do not pay for – thanks in large part to those unrestricted donations.

All Berea College students get free tuition, and the small Kentucky school has also committed to covering all other attendance costs too.

3. Helping students afford all college costs so they can graduate

Supporting students directly helps them go to college, .

Donors already make gifts that fund schools’ financial aid packages, with about . But the colleges and universities that receive the most dollars from donors serve a small fraction of the nation’s undergraduate students – . We recommend that donors consider making gifts to the thousands of colleges and universities, including community colleges, that don’t typically draw big donations and have endowments totaling in the millions, .

Sometimes it takes more than tuition scholarships for students to graduate. Donors can pay for additional expenses, such as transportation and textbooks, and fund extra academic advising and mentoring. Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold’s at Arizona’s Maricopa Community Colleges addresses those kinds of often overlooked priorities.

You don’t have to be very wealthy to fund scholarships. Anyone can pitch in through platforms like . This program’s more than 400 chapters enable local donors to pool their gifts to help students raised in their communities pay college expenses. For example, a rural Minnesota chapter awarded $248,000 to 65 college-bound students in 2025.

There are also hundreds of other place-based “” that provide tuition and fees scholarships to public colleges and universities in their areas and offer programming such as college readiness workshops and access to local employers.

Philanthropy can’t solve every problem higher education faces. But by giving together, donating with fewer strings attached and helping students pay their college expenses, alumni and other donors can be strategic in how they help.

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