Elite rich colleges richest in donations

For the 99 percent of colleges, it was a pretty good fundraising year.

For the 1 percent of super-wealthy elite, it was a much better one that catapulted them even farther ahead of the pack.

The latest annual college fundraising figures out today show donations to colleges and universities rose 8.2 percent in fiscal 2011, crossing back over the $30-billion mark for just the second time ever, and improving many schools' financial footing after several lean years during the economic downturn.

But the very richest universities accounted for nearly half the growth: Of the $30.3 billion collected by colleges and universities nationwide, $8.2 billion, or 27 percent, was raised by just the top 20 institutions. At those universities fundraising was 15.3 percent higher than the year before, widening an already yawning wealth gap at the top of higher education.

Stanford University, which recently broke a record by completing a five-year, $6.2-billion fundraising campaign, led with $709.4 million collected in fiscal 2011, followed by Harvard ($639.2 million) and Yale ($580.3 million). Rounding out the list were private universities such as Columbia and Johns Hopkins, as well as elite public universities such as UCLA and the Universities of Texas, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Most campuses on the list have major medical schools and affiliated research centers, though No. 4 MIT ($534 million) is an exception.

In fact, the top 20 schools account for 2 percent of the 1,009 respondents to the annual Voluntary Support of Education survey by the Council for Aid to Education. But they highlight a fundraising distribution that calls to mind last year's Occupy protests against U.S. income inequality. In fact, the fundraising distribution in higher education is more skewed than income: The top 25 percent of universities account for 86 percent of all private dollars raised for higher education, and the bottom quarter just 1 percent.