Donor Behavior and Voluntary Support for Higher Education Institutions.
Income from private giving has always been of great importance to American colleges and universities. Through the rest of this century, however, maintaining and expanding these resources will approach crucial significance. In short, voluntary support has both a timeless and a timeliness dimension. Unlike appropriations and allocations from government and income from many other sources, voluntary support for colleges and universities takes on relatively unrestricted spending forms. Whereas the spending of governmental monies and other resources generally are prescribed or at least closely regulated, much voluntary support may be expended almost without constraint. The result is that endowment and related funds often are the major sources of institutional discretionary funds by which innovations may be introduced, risks may be taken, and investments in the future may be made. Voluntary support frequently provides the margin of excellence, the element of vitality, that separates one institution from another and allows institutions to escape from the routinized sameness of fully regulated organizations. In addition to the timeless importance of voluntary support, there is also a timeliness dimension. The present pervasive decline in resources available to institutions of higher education, caused by the ubiquitous budget cuts on campus, has raised the importance of voluntary support to a critical level. Voluntary support is becoming the only source of real discretionary money and in many cases is assum-