A new AEI database called SOURCE, opens a window on the donations made by private foundations to the nation’s colleges and universities.
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What are the higher education priorities of America’s private foundations? Which foundations spend the most? What activities do they prioritze? And which institutions reap the largest benefits? Answers to those questions are now available in a new database called SOURCE, the Searchable Open University Records of Charitable Expenditures.
Developed by Tao Tan, affiliate scholar at the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for the Future of the American University, the interactive tool contains data on more than one million grants made by more than 57,000 U.S. private foundations to nearly 5,300 higher education institutions between 2008 and 2025. Those grants totaled more than $90.7 billion.
Tan built the portal using publicly available 990-PF forms, the annual return that private foundations must file with the Internal Revenue Service. The data are particularly complete since 2020, when the IRS began requiring e-filing tax returns. In addition to cataloging the source, recipient, and amount of private foundation grants, SOURCE classifies each of them by one or more purpose “tags,” such as research, financial aid, STEM, capital, and athletics.
“This information is often difficult to navigate, difficult to read and to the best of my knowledge no one has put together something systematic like this specifically focused on higher education,” Tan said during a recent webinar about the tool. “What led to [the creation of SOURCE] was three questions: Where is the money coming from, and where is it going? What is it funding? And what patterns can we find?”
Giving and Receiving Are Highly Concentrated
Of the 57,339 foundations that gave to higher education during the sampled time period, just 165 donated half the total dollars.
The top grantor was the Gates Foundation which gave colleges and universities $9.1 billion, more than the next six largest foundations combined. Rounding out the top 10 foundations were the Lilly Endowment ($2 billion), the Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation ($1.7 billion), the Bloomberg Family Foundation ($1.4 billion), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ($1.4 billion), the John Templeton Foundation ($1.1 billion), the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation ($980 million), the Knight Foundation ($849 million), the Simons Foundation ($736 million), and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ($660 million).
A similar degree of concentration is found at the level of the recipients, with 10 universities receiving more than 20% of the total donated amount. Of the 5,270 institutions that received grants, 54, just 1%, got half the money. Harvard University, Stanford University, and Johns Hopkins University, led the pack, each receiving more than $2.5 billion. They were followed by the University of Washington ($2 billion), Columbia University ($1.9 billion), Duke University ($1.4 billion), the University of Pennsylvania ($1.3 billion), Yale University ($1.3 billion), the University of Michigan ($1.2 billion) and MIT ($1.2 billion). By contrast, the 526 community colleges included in the dataset received only $1.3 billion combined, much less than the amount given to any one of the top five schools.
According to Tan, “private philanthropy intensifies rather than flattens the prestige hierarchy of American higher education.”
Size Matters
The largest foundation gifts go for research, STEM and capital projects. The median research grant was $93,000; while the average grant for a building or laboratory was $460,000. The smallest awards fund student financial aid and institutional general support, each with a median amount of $4,000.
Among those foundations giving more than $100 million over the data set’s time period, 71% of their money went toward faculty-focused activities while 26% was granted for student financial aid or general purposes. Among the thousands of small foundations, each giving under $10 million, only 19% of their grants were given for faculty academic activities, while 76% was spent on financial aid and general purposes. As Tan noted, “the mega-funders support research and science, the smaller funders support financial aid and help keep the lights on.”
Two Strategies: “Spreaders” and “Concentrators”
Large funders tend to follow one of two distinct strategies in their giving, according to Tan. “Spreaders” distribute their funding to a relatively large number of institutions. For example, the Mellon Foundation contributed an average grant of $580,000 to 426 campuses since 2016; while the Charles Koch Foundation distributed 430 grants averaging $350,000 over the same period.
“Concentrators,” on the other hand, tend to focus their giving. Bloomberg’s $1.4 billion was given to 37 schools, more than 70% of it just to Johns Hopkins. The Duke Endowment funded 18 institutions, while Knight gave $850 million to three schools.
In the big scheme of things, private foundations provide a small amount of the total funding for America’s colleges and universities. But it’s an important source, nonetheless, providing support for activities that individual donors and public appropriations and grants may neglect. Foundations put their money where their priorities are, and now SOURCE opens a valuable window on those choices, permitting the public to see where and why they donate their higher education gifts.
