UT Austin Raising Funds at Historic Pace

The University of Texas at Austin has raised more than $300 million from donors during the current fiscal year, which does not end until Aug. 31. If it continues at the current pace, UT Austin will have its best fundraising year in history, surpassing the $366 million it raised in 2008.

“I’m so grateful to our alumni and friends for the strategic investments they are making in UT Austin,” said President Bill Powers, “and I’m very proud of the fundraising team we have in place that is succeeding so dramatically during these still-challenging economic times. I know we can reach our goal, and when we do, those funds will fuel UT’s ascent to the top tier of global public higher education.”

Highlights of this year’s efforts include:

• UT Austin has raised $302 million year-to-date compared with $222 million at this point last year.
• The amount of total alumni giving year-to-date has virtually doubled, from approximately $87 million to $174 million.
• Gifts from estates have increased year-to-date by more than 150 percent, the result of increased efforts to encourage planned gifts when supporters write their wills.
• The University of Texas at Austin has collected more than $1 million, on average, every business day in donations.
• The university has received more than 123,000 gifts made this fiscal year.

Major gifts and pledges contributing to this year’s success have included:

• $50 million from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation for the creation of the Dell Medical School at UT Austin
• $25 million from the Robert Rowling Family toward the construction of a new building for graduate studies at the McCombs School of Business
• Five estate gifts of $5 million or more

The numbers bode well for the “Campaign for Texas,” the university’s ambitious $3 billion, eight-year capital campaign. Only two other public universities in the United States are attempting to raise $3 billion, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Virginia.

To date, UT Austin has raised more than $2.1 billion for the campaign. Before the “Campaign for Texas,” the most successful capital campaign in the state was UT Austin’s “We’re Texas” campaign of the late 1990s, which raised $1.6 billion.