Colleges Reaching Out For Dollars

The News & Observer
 Barbara Barrett, Staff Writer
July 12, 2003

HENDERSON — Robert A. Miller doesn’t have to say a word. He lets the plaques do the talking.

Dozens line the wood-paneled walls of the boardroom at Vance-Granville Community College, engraved with the names of the donors and recipients of endowed scholarships.

And when Miller, the college president, talks to prospective new industries about what his college can do for them, visitors learn, just by reading the walls, what they can do in return: give cash.

“They can’t help but want to feel a part of what’s going on,” Miller said.

The plaques and other marketing have helped Vance-Granville quietly raise an endowment of more than $4.9 million in one of the state’s poorest regions. The principal is never spent; the interest paid FOR 484 scholarships this past school year.

Throughout the nation, community colleges are turning to private resources for help in maintaining programs and educating students. But their missions often lack the flash of university campaigns and the expertise and staff to master the intricacies of charitable giving, so community colleges have had to find their own ways to bring in the dollars.

Leaders at the two-year institutions want to get their message out. Nationally, 45 percent of undergraduates study at community colleges, and the schools often are at the forefront of community economic development projects.

But everything is smaller at their level: the fund-raising staff, the prestige, the financial firepower.

Battling the big schools

While UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University tend their billion-dollar endowments, the N.C. Community College System said Friday that it is near the end of a successful statewide campaign that pulled in more than $6 million.

And it took four years just to raise that much.

For community colleges, a “major gift” is like the one announced at a dinner Friday, $250,000 given in honor of W. Dallas Herring, a longtime member of the State Board of Education who was instrumental in forming the community college system. The money, donated anonymously by a group of Herring’s friends, will be used to train college administrators.

“We’re the new kid on the block,” said Karen L. Jackson, a fund-raising consultant and the former development officer at Blue Ridge Community College in Flat Rock. “But we’re learning. We’re learning fast.”

It’s difficult to track the dollars raised by community college foundations. Nationally, 79 percent of the schools responding to a survey of the American Association of Community Colleges said they had foundations, with an average worth of $2.3 million. Association leaders think many more exist.

In North Carolina, there is a statewide foundation, and each of the 58 schools in the system has its own private foundation, at least on paper, but no one in Raleigh keeps track of the giving.

Many of the local colleges were upset when the statewide foundation launched its own campaign in 1999 after years of dormancy. System leaders promised to focus on projects such as training administrators and giving financial awards to top instructors, but worries persisted.

Smaller contributions

Jackson, who wrote her dissertation at N.C. State University on community college fund raising, found that taxpayers think state and county budgets meet the schools’ needs. Community colleges also don’t take full advantage of alumni bases, she said, and they lack the expertise to manage major donations.

“I don’t think we ask for the huge amounts of money that universities ask for,” she said.

That’s not to say community colleges don’t want more. Just like university fund-raisers, community college system President Martin Lancaster spent the past four years traveling the state visiting corporations and foundations. He’s frustrated with the knowledge that a company might give $5 million to a university and $50,000 to a community college.

“It’s a sad but true occurrence every day, and I do not know why, when community colleges have such a profound impact,” Lancaster said. “We just keep begging. You can’t make them do more.”

It’s even worse in the Triangle and other urban areas, where community colleges often are overshadowed by universities.

Mary Lou Rollins, who heads the foundation at Durham Technical Community College, said she routinely sees representatives from Duke, UNC-CH and N.C. Central University at the same civic clubs and community events.

“I’m in competition with major players,” she said.

Lancaster said there’s another challenge: no football team. Sports offer donors something to rally around, a reason for business leaders and alumni to reconnect with their university.

It takes money to get good tickets, too. John K. Nelms, a businessman from Oxford, said recently that he doesn’t give to his alma mater, N.C. State, though he still pays more than $30,000 for football and basketball season tickets.

Closer to home, Nelms also has given about $25,000 to Vance-Granville, mostly because he understands the impact the college has in its rural, four-county region.

“It serves the local community,” Nelms said. His donations sponsor two annual scholarships. Every year, he and all the other donors meet their recipients at a scholarship reception.

Colleges in rural areas often have more success. North of the Triangle, Vance-Granville is the leading purveyor of higher education. In Vance, Granville, Warren and Franklin counties, where the average unemployment rate is 8.6 percent , one in seven adults takes classes at the college.

There, a gift of $6,000, $12,000 or $25,000 will endow a scholarship. The college’s marketing director, James Edwards, snaps a picture of each new donor and submits it to the local newspaper.

And every year, the college sends a class schedule to more than 80,000 households, with dozens of grip-and-grin pictures of donors and students. It works.

“We kept seeing information in the paper, individuals and companies supporting the college,” said Eddie Ferguson, a real-estate developer whose family foundation began sponsoring scholarships in 2000. Now, the Ferguson Family Foundation has a plaque in the Vance-Granville boardroom, listing each student recipient.

It’s almost getting to be too much, engraving dozens of plaques each summer, Edwards said.

“They’re becoming very high maintenance.”