The 10th issue of Philanthropy & Education has been released, marking five full years of the journal. Sponsored by Teachers College, Columbia University and published by Indiana University Press, Philanthropy & Education publishes interdisciplinary works which examine prosocial voluntary actions benefitting education. Below, please find all of the articles and abstracts from Volume 5. To learn more about prior or future issues of Philanthropy & Education, please click here.

Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring 2022

• 5th Anniversary Editorial

Connecting the Dots: Fostering a Scholarly Community through Philanthropy & Education

Noah D. Drezner, Founding Editor

• Research Articles

Preparing International Scholarship Students for Graduate Education: The Case of the Open Society Foundations’ Pre-Academic Summer Program

Anne C. Campbell and Rasjit Basi

To support higher education, global philanthropies provide diverse funding to organizations, individuals, and networks. This case study focuses on a unique model in philanthropy in education: the Open Society Foundations’ Pre-Academic Summer Program or “OSF Summer School.” To prepare civil society leaders and activists for graduate level study, this month-long intensive program aims to mirror the academic environment and expectations of the grantees’ host universities. Through this case study, findings show that the OSF Summer School teaches students academic skills and provides valuable lessons in interpreting academic culture. By funding and administering this initiative, OSF extends its commitment to educational access by providing programming designed for non-traditional profiles. This case study aims to inform other global foundations and higher education institutions working to prepare scholarship grantees, including individuals from marginalized communities, for international graduate education.

Philanthropy at Elite Research Universities: The Role of Trustees and Trustee-Affiliated Organizations

Sandra N. Barringer and Karley A. Riffe

Literature on philanthropy in higher education is limited, especially concerning the philanthropic behaviors of college and university trustees. We address gaps in the literatures on higher education philanthropy and university trustees through an exploratory comparative case study of donations made by trustees and trustee-affiliated organizations. Drawing on microfoundations theory from neoinstitutionalism, we argue and show that trustees and trustee-affiliated organizations, via their philanthropic behaviors, shape the universities they steward in a myriad of ways. Within our case study, we analyzed donation exchanges across four elite research universities to develop three models of trustee philanthropy (facilitators, supporters and patrons) and two models of trustee-affiliated organizational philanthropy (sponsors and advocates). Differences across institutions highlight the variation across trustees, trustee-affiliated organizations, and universities in how they engage each other in philanthropic relationships. Drawing on these differences, we generate suggestions for practice and future research.

Institutional Student Diversity in Higher Education: Are Alumni Part of the Equation?

Jason P. Guilbeau

Through a blended sociological and economic conceptual framework, this study employed fixed effects regression models for a sample of 87 public and 198 private four-year institutions to understand the relationship of institutional student diversity and the diversity of an institution’s alumni, the percent of alumni who made a financial contribution, and the amount of gifts from alumni. While relationships were found to exist for all but one model, this exploratory study highlights the data and conceptual limitations of connecting macro-level factors of diversity with an important aspect of institutional funding, alumni giving.

• Book Review

Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy during Jim Crow by. T. M. Freeman

Audrey Thomas McCluskey

Vol. 5, No. 1, Fall 2021

• Research Article
  
  Patterns of Philanthropic Gifts Among Student-Athlete Alumni: A Case Study of a Midwest UniversityTimothy Tesar

The purpose of this case study was to describe the experiences of Theodore University (a pseudonym for a Midwest university) student-athlete alumni in their deciding whether to give philanthropically. A qualitative approach was used to gauge the propensity and intrinsic desires of these alumni to either give, or not give, monetary support to Theodore. Data analysis included values coding that highlighted and identified how the participants experienced the phenomenon of philanthropy. This study was designed around social exchange theory and the assumption that a series of interactions generate obligations to give monetary donations. Findings from this study included: participants who had a closer connection to the university and had been approached for a specific request to support Theodore were more likely to give, give more frequently, and give larger amounts; financial donations to Theodore were much less compared to other nonprofit organizations; participants who had strong motivations to give also felt a strong connection to their team, a coach, a faculty member, academic department, or athletic department. This study fills a gap in the recent scholarly literature about the psychology and altruism of philanthropic support of student-athlete alumni to their alma mater.

• Research Note
  
  Corporate Philanthropy and BeyondMorgan R. Clevenger and Cynthia J. MacGregor

Corporate philanthropy still endures, yet businesses have expanded the nature of their partnerships with higher education over the past 50 years. Companies have responsibilities and demands they are expected to perform to be perceived as ‘good’ and contributing to society in beneficial ways. With public funding declines and competition for tuition dollars, both public and private higher education have become more reliant on corporate resources. The resulting inter-organizational partnerships include corporate engagement such as pro bono work or volunteerism, support for educational resources, sponsored programming, basic as well as applied research, economic development, entrepreneurship, and protection of environmental sustainability. This research note explores these relationships through The Academy-Business Inter-Organizational Partnership Typology (ABIOPT), a framework with four partnership categories: philanthropic, transactional, symbiotic, and synergistic. This model is built on historical perspectives of these partnerships. The research usefulness of the model is explored, including a call to action for more empirical data regarding the inter-organizational relationships between higher education and businesses.

• Systematic Literature Review
  
  Experiential Philanthropy: A Systematic Review of Peer-Reviewed LiteratureHanjin Mao

This paper provides a systematic review of the experiential philanthropy studies published in peer-reviewed journals. There are 18 articles published in journals in diverse disciplines from 2005 through 2020. The study does bibliometric analysis on the journals, year of publication, and co-authorship network. Four major research themes emerge in the literature: the concept of experiential philanthropy, its roots in service-learning, current practice, and the efficacy of experiential philanthropy. A variety of methodologies have been applied in previous experiential philanthropy studies, including case studies, quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and experiments. The author also addresses the limitations of previous studies and points out the future direction of experiential philanthropy research.

Learn more about the Philanthropy & Education journal here.