‘Tis the season for multibillion dollar university campaigns. In September and October, UVA ended the “silent” phase of its capital campaign, and several other schools also made public their considerable underground moneymaking efforts. Though UVA called its $3 billion campaign the biggest nonprofit fundraising effort in history when it began in 2005, some of the newly announced campaigns best the University with goals upwards of $4 billion. And, according to Inside Higher Education, insiders at Harvard expect them to announce in the near future a campaign of more than $5 billion.
Right now there are 27 institutions with campaigns seeking $1 billion or more. Though spokespeople for UVA have emphasized it’s not a competition, we just can’t resist keeping score.
| University | Amount | Officially Announced | Raised to Date |
| Stanford | $4.3 billion | October 3 | $3.12 billion |
| Columbia | $4 billion | September 29 | $1.5 billion |
| Cornell | $4 billion | October 26 | $1 billion |
| Johns Hopkins | $3.2 billion | October 28 | $2.3 billion |
| UVA | $3 billion | September 29 | $1.012 billion |
| Yale | $3 billion | September 30 | $1.308 billion |
Source: Individual campaign websites.
