UCLA will announce today that it garnered $3.05 billion in gifts and pledges in its recently completed 10 1/2-year fundraising campaign, the largest donations total ever in American academia.
The tally surpasses the previous national record for a university fundraising drive, $2.85 billion, announced in 2003 by crosstown rival USC.
UCLA's effort dovetailed with an increasingly widespread assessment, often emphasized by campus Chancellor Albert Carnesale, that leading public universities need to step up their fundraising to compete against top private universities for the best professors and students.
Carnesale and other public university leaders also have cited an intensified need to attract private donations to help cushion the schools against volatile state funding for higher education in California and elsewhere.
Carnesale acknowledged that UCLA's total donations were pumped up by the length of its drive, which was several years longer than most university campaigns. USC's drive lasted 9 1/2 years.
He pointed out that a few leading private universities, including USC, have roughly matched or outpaced his campus' annual fundraising levels over the last decade. Still, he described UCLA as the fundraising leader among public universities, and noted that its annual gifts and pledges have roughly tripled since the early 1990s.
The donations total "enhances and underscores our optimism about the future of UCLA," said Carnesale, who as UCLA's leader for nearly nine years has overseen most of the campaign. The proceeds, he said, can't fully offset lagging state funding in recent years. Still, the drive "does help to explain why despite the tough budget situation, UCLA continues to be one of the top universities in the country," Carnesale said.
UCLA's campaign was quietly launched in 1995 and officially announced in 1997, with a goal of raising $1.2 billion over seven years. The goal was later raised twice, up to $2.4 billion, and the drive was extended by three years to the end of 2005.
Although university fundraising suffered for a couple of years following the dot-com collapse, the drive largely coincided with a time of strong philanthropy toward universities. That trend has benefited Southern California's top three research universities -- UCLA, USC and Caltech, which is about $300 million shy of reaching its goal of raising $1.4 billion by the end of 2007.
