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236. Foreign Gifts and Higher Education: Evidence from the US

Cade White, Dr. Jayash Paudel

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Introduction

  • Since 2013, over $12 billion has been gifted to US universities
  • Research on university-level characteristics that affect foreign funding is limited
  • I examine how foreign funding received by universities changes over time
  • I also account for university-level and geographic factors that influence the amount of foreign gifts

Geographical Distribution

Europe, the Middle East, and southeast Asia make the up largest groups, with other funding sources coming from west and south Africa, Central America, the Caribbean, and Australia
Figure 1: Geographical location of countries that provide funding to US universities

Gifts by Type

  • Contract Gifts: 56.5%
  • Monetary Gifts: 43.5%
  • Real Estate Gifts: 0.0004%
  • Total transactions: 23,021

Top Gifting Nations (Since 2013)

  • England: $1.1B
  • China: $900M
  • Canada: $470M

Summary of Results

2013, slightly more than 400000; 2014, slightly more than 2013 rates; 2015, slightly lower than 2014 rates; 2016 above 700000; 2017 slightly higher than 2015 rates; 2018, close to 500000; 2019, slightly less than 2016 rates
Figure 2: Annual trends in foreign funding received by US universities

Changes over Time

  • 2016 recorded near $2.5B in foreign gifts, the highest of any year in our data
  • I would like to examine what factors lead to yearly spikes in foreign gifts, and whether differences in trends exist between private and public universities

Conclusion and Next Steps

  • Significant differences in foreign funding received by US universities exist across different years in the sample
  • In the future, I plan to conduct fixed effects linear regression model to evaluate the linkage between foreign gifts and university-level characteristics

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