Impacts of the 2008 Financial
Crisis on Fundraising
and Endowments: Ten-Year Trend
Data on Sources of Support to
U.S. Colleges and Universities
Sancho Sequeira
August, 2020
Methodology
Data
The data in this report is sourced from the CASE Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) Survey. To make year-over-year comparisons analogous, we only included institutions that participated every year from 2008-2019. The final sample contains data from 631 institutions. For a breakdown by institution type, please see the “Sample Size and 2008 Baseline Data” table below.
Variable Definitions
Some variables in this report were derived from a few different VSE variables. The definitions of these variables are below:
- Total Personal Giving - sum of gifts from Alumni, Parents, and Other Individuals.
- Total Org Giving - sum of gifts from Foundations, Corporations, and Other Organizations .
- Nine Large Gifts – sum of the top 3 gifts from each of the following sources: Living Individuals, Foundations, and Corporations.
Years to Recovery and Percentage Recovered Calculations
In the Years to Recovery section, variables were averaged for each year by Category of Support and Institution Type. The average for 2008 was then subtracted from each year, including 2008. This sets the average for 2008 to $0 and provides a baseline for the subsequent years. If the line is below $0 that means the average for that year was below the average in 2008. When the line goes above $0 that means the average was above the average in 2008.
In the Percentage Recovered section, we instead focused on the recovery of individual institutions. For each institution, we subtracted the data from 2008 from each year, including 2008. We then found the first year where the institution reported a higher number than 2008 and considered them “recovered” from that point forward. Finally, we calculated the average number of institutions “recovered” per year to obtain the “% of Institutions Recovered” for each Category of Support and Institution Type.