Why Are Community Colleges So Slow to Jump on the Fund-Raising Bandwagon?

By DONALD C. SUMMERS

America is in the midst of the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. By several measures, well over $100-trillion will exchange hands in the next decades as baby-boomer wealth passes to the next generation. Along with the rest of the nonprofit sector, higher education is already harvesting those riches, with an average of more than $25-billion donated to postsecondary education in the United States each year.

Compared with four-year colleges and universities, community colleges receive only a small fraction of that money. According to the Council for Aid to Education, the average two-year institution received about $1.4-million in voluntary support in 2004-5; the most that any community college reported raising that year was about $16-million.