NUS's alumni giving rate

Aaron Ng wonders why only 1% of NUS alumni give back to their alma mater and is shocked by Princeton's and Harvard's alumni giving rates of 61% and 44% respectively. His reason's that NUS students right now (unlike in the 70s and early 80s) don't feel that they have a say in how their university is being run, whereas at other top-ranked universities, "students have the ability to influence policy." The "net result is that students end up not feeling for their university anymore."

Some thoughts:

1) NUS can't be compared to Princeton or Harvard or Dartmouth. The latter are private universities which depend entirely on alumni giving to survive. NUS gets subsidised by the government. Its alumni know this, and a lot of them just don't think that they need to give money to what was, until very recently, a government statutory board. The institutions whose giving rates NUS's should be compared to are top American public universities like UC Berkeley or the University of Virginia. (According to this PDF, those rates for 2006 are 14% and 26% respectively.)

2) Hypothesis: the wealthier a university's alumni, the more likely they are to give money to their school. How much on average does an NUS graduate earn per month compared to, say, the average Harvard graduate? And what about the graduates of other top Asian universities?

3) We've heard from those who aren't giving to NUS. What about those who do? What are their reasons for doing so?

4) Is the 1% figure really down to students not having a say in how their school's being run? And is it really true that students elsewhere have the ability to influence policy in the way that NUS students don't? I'm not so sure. I don't think any American university today allows its students a real say in major policy decisions. At Dartmouth, the trustees raise the school fees every year. But we were never asked what we thought about it (at least NUS goes through the motions); we were simply told to accept it as a fact of life. And yet, Dartmouth's alumni giving rate remains really high (47% if I'm not mistaken). It may be, of course, that NUS alumni really don't give money to their alma mater because of how politically marginalised they felt while as students. But I don't see this causal relationship being very applicable.

5) The real reason, I suspect, is that NUS simply doesn't inspire in its students the same affection that places like Dartmouth do. Not having attended the school, and not really having spoken to many of my friends about their experiences at NUS, I can't really say more on this. I will say, though, that I am more attached to Dartmouth than I am to any of my Singapore schools, Liverpool Football Club, and Singapore itself.
Posted by kungfuzi at 12:03 am |