Colleges: Giving Is Growing

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Mrs. Stanley P. Jadwin's husband, a rich drug manufacturer who died in 1936, was a graduate of Columbia University. Her son, L. Stockwell Jadwin, was an honor student and track-team captain at Princeton who died in an auto accident shortly after his graduation in 1928. Before her own death last fall in her lifetime Brooklyn house, Mrs. Jadwin had decided to bequeath her fortune to a university as a memorial to both. Last week Princeton President Robert F. Goheen was able to announce that Mrs. Jadwin chose Princeton rather than Columbia for that memorial: a no-strings gift of $27 million.

Philanthropy on that scale is rare in U.S. education (it is one of the largest single-donor gifts any university has received), but general private support of higher education is still rising rapidly. The annual survey of 50 U.S. colleges and universities by New York's John Price Jones Co., professional fund raisers, shows that gifts spurted 11.3% last year over 1963—from $335,456,000 to $373,446,000. Contributions from individuals still provide the biggest single source of such funds (39.3%), but foundation grants are growing (now 33.1%), while bequests (16.9%) and corporations (10.7%) provide the rest. The gifts of the past four years alone total more than a fourth of the $4.8 billion that the Jones surveys have tabulated in their 44 years of existence.

The top ten beneficiaries in 1964:

Harvard $38,812,000

Stanford 36,078,000

Cornell 27,695,000

Yale 22,538,000

M.I.T. 21,133,000

Chicago 20,555,000

California 16,602,000

Princeton 16,416,000

Columbia 16,001,000

N.Y.U. 15,741,000