March 28, 2008
Yale May Raise Campaign Goal
Yale University announced its $3-billion fund-raising campaign in 2006, but since then officials have decided to build two new residential colleges on the campus, the costs of which were not included in the goal. Now, the Yale Daily News reports, the campaign may be restarted with the new target as much as $4-billion.
Currently the largest fund-raising campaign underway in higher education is at Stanford University, where officials hope to raise $4.3-billion by 2011. Columbia and Cornell Universities are each in $4-billion campaigns.
“The goal of $3-billion was set to meet the priorities that we identified at the time, and we don’t want to go back to deans or faculty and say, ‘Well, sorry, we have to take a few things away because we need to raise money now for a new priority,’” Inge Reichenbach, vice president for development at Yale, told the newspaper. “That is not what we want to do. That is not what is going to happen.”
Yale is already ahead of the game, having raised almost $2.1-billion. It puts the university one year ahead of schedule in the campaign, though some people have questioned why the goal was not set higher to begin with, as other “peer institutions” were raising more.
Yale officials believe the new target will be between $3.5-billion and $4-billion.
“We need to think about raising the goal,” Richard Levin, university president, said in the article. “We’re assessing the feasibility of doing so.”
Erin Strout | Posted on Friday March 28, 2008 | Permalink
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