Giving Tuesday: Big donations pour in to help colleges, students

Several institutions report receiving more than $1 million and 2,000 individual gifts from alumni and donors.

From early returns, Giving Tuesday was again a resounding success again for higher education.

According to data released by Anthology, one of the many doing tabulations of the Thanksgiving week event, the total dollars raised by colleges and universities alone that use the platform Encompass eclipsed more than $9.5 million. From small to large institutions, there were 37,000-plus individual donations for an average gift of $260. Overall, $2.7 billion was gifted to various missions throughout the U.S., including those unrelated to higher ed.

Though its total monetary number was down a bit from 2020, Anthology officials noted that was not unexpected given the outpouring of support that occurred during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic last fall. A year later, with need still paramount, those amounts still surpassed 2019 numbers by more than $2 million.