Among colleges, the rich get richer

Recently, Cornell University announced a tremendous gift from a family that has a 120-year relationship with the institution. This gift of $150 million is targeted toward Cornell’s recently revamped business school and is the largest gift in the history of this venerable institution. Of the sum, $100 million alone will go to an endowment to help the new college of business achieve its “highest ambitions.”

Put that news alongside the findings of a recent study by a team of economists. Among other things, they learned that some colleges enroll more students from the top 1% of the economy than from the bottom 60%. Thirtyeight colleges and universities in the United States had more students from families earning $630,000 per year or more than they did from families earning less than $65,000 a year.

Cornell isn’t one of those 38. It ranks 86th, with “only” 10% of its students hailing from the top 1%. A full 20% come from the bottom 60% combined. The median family income at Cornell is over $150,000 a year.

It is understandable that many very wellmeaning philanthropists are justifiably praised for these gifts.

But enriching an already wealthy institution — which boasts a $6 billion endowment and serves a disproportionate share of wealthy families — is simply a waste of money. It continues to exacerbate the income and wealth gap, where the haves get additional resources and the have-nots keep spinning their wheels.

I reviewed the financial profiles of more than 60 colleges and universities that have received gifts of at least $100 million since 1967. These institutions’ average percentage of students from the top income bracket at these schools was 56% — 11 times the number of students from the bottom income bracket.

Another way to look at this is that in the name of philanthropy, donors have given $100 million gifts to institutions that have median family incomes as high as $204,000 a year.

To place this in perspective, the average percentage of all college students from the top income bracket is 34%; from the lowest income bracket, it’s 9%. As we know, many low-income students are unable to make it to college at all.

But when I look specifically at my sector — I am president of a historically black university — the disparities grow still starker. At HBCUs, which serve nearly 300,000 students, twice as many students are from the bottom economic quintile (24%) as there were from the top (12%).

Yet despite this high number of low-income students, a report by the Brookings Institution concluded that 85% of HBCUs had a better success of moving students up two or more income brackets. For example, in Louisiana, the five HBCUs fill five of the six top spots in overall economic mobility for all Louisiana institutions.

Yet none of those five schools, in fact no HBCUs ever, have been recipients of a gift of at least $100 million. The largest cash gift a historically black college ever received was $35 million to Johnson C. Smith University from the Duke Endowment in 2011. The record gift by an individual? Twenty-nine years ago, Bill and Camille Cosby gave Spelman College $20 million. Today, a gift of about $42 million would be equivalent, and we’ve seen nothing close to that.

For most, a record gift may mean $5 million. And this is the problem.

There clearly is a segment of American higher education dedicated to the mission of educating all students, specializing in low-income students of color. According to objective research, it outperforms most of higher education in accomplishing this goal.

And yet this segment, just like the population it serves, continues to be ignored by a philanthropic community that favors wealth and prestige, even though these institutions and their students are not in need of philanthropy. In fact, they often have every possible advantage to begin with.

There is no doubt that the family that recently lavished some of its fortune on Cornell feels great pride in providing for a school that has great meaning as part of their family history. But this gift changes nothing for Cornell students, their families or the nation.

A $150 million gift to an institution whose endowment is a fraction of the gift itself, on the other hand, would not only transform an institution. It would transform students and their families. It might even change family trajectories for generations.