Student Affairs Needs Fundraising Staff

My last post showed a chart outlining how the Ontario government allocates funding to various categories. Funding for post-secondary institutions in the 05/06 fiscal year amounted to 5.6% of the province's expenses. The revenue collected by a university comes from more then the province though.

As Daniel Lang, from OISE, has outlined the different sources of revenue for universities has fluctuated over time. This chart shows four points in time over a 40 year period beginning in the late 1950's:



The chart clearly shows a trend the governments are providing a lower portion of the revenue for universities in Canada. Some schools have been fortunate enough to receive major donations in the past decade from some of Canada's wealthy people such as Ted Rogers (Ryerson), Seymour Schulich (York, UWO, Calgary, McGill), George Vari (Ryerson, York, UofT), Richard Ivey (UWO), Wallace McCain (Mount Allison), Mike Lazaridis (Waterloo), Jim Balsillie (Waterloo, WLU) and others.

There is little reason to believe that the trend of declining government funding will be reversed in the near future, which means that Canada's post-secondary schools must continue to look to wealthy citizens. To date the vast majority, if not all, of the donations made to higher education in Canada have been directed to academic activities and faculties.

This last fact makes me wonder if student affairs is missing out on an opportunity. The work of student affairs staff can have a tremendous impact on a student's career and chances are that today's donors were likely heavily involved in activities outside of the classroom. For this reason it might be time that student affairs staff get involved in fundraising efforts.

(Source: Lang, D. (2004). Financing Higher Education in Canada. In Steve O. Michael (Eds.), International Perspectives on Financing Higher Education (pp. unknown). Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.)