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| Best Practices: Education |
Well Endowed
Michelle Seaton
01/01/2006
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Lawrence Funderburke, the former National Basketball Association player and
author of Hook Me Up, Playa! (Wetherby Press), a book about finding success
through sound money management, has become the very model of a modern
scholarship donor.
TOP VIEW
Supplying the means for a needy student to attend college may seem like the
ultimate in largess, but today the process is often fraught with limitations and
delays. Bound by new laws and regulations, colleges and universities demand
carefully worded scholarship agreements and multiple meetings with funders. In
most cases, benefactors must be flexible and patient as they wade through
academic bureaucracies. |
But in 2001, when Funderburke—who graduated magna cum
laude from Ohio State in 1994 with a financial management degree and was
promptly drafted by the Sacramento Kings—announced his intention to give the
school $100,000 for a scholarship fund, he had no idea that he would spend the
next four years attending rounds of meetings with the financial aid office and
deans of the school’s various colleges.
As Jim Miller, alumni relations
director at his alma mater, the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State (OSU),
points out, “Mr. Funderburke really wanted to educate himself about the best way
to create an endowment.”
Funderburke, revealing a preternatural tolerance for
red tape, recalls, “The process was very smooth.” But as of December,
Funderburke was still waiting for final reviews from the school’s lawyers,
financial aid office and trustees; OSU expects to make the first round of
scholarships available for the fall 2006 semester.
Initially, Funderburke
expected to simply hand over his money and let the school distribute it to half
a dozen motivated students who, like he, grew up in the Columbus, Ohio, housing
projects and were interested in studying business. Instead, he received a
postgraduate lesson in scholarship philanthropy. While Funderburke downplays the
bureaucratic maze, many donors who think they can steer their hard-earned or
inherited largess strictly to students of their choosing are likely to become
frustrated. Over the past decade, especially since states began considering
antidiscrimination laws targeting any kind of favoritism based on race, colleges
and universities are increasingly demanding the power to determine who gets the
scholarships. If donors cannot compromise, school administrators may send them
on their way.
Winding Rhodes
When donors dictate very specific academic paths or
background experiences, they put the schools in a difficult position for a
number of reasons. First, the schools’ aim is to keep the pool of potential
applicants broad, so that over forthcoming decades the scholarship will be
available every year, regardless of the changing fashions of educational
disciplines.
This is not a new plea on their part. Any university
development director can name the perfectly structured endowment. In fact, it
has become the most famous scholarship of all: the one Cecil Rhodes set up in
1903, with his personal fortune of £3 million. Besides the fact that Oxford has
managed the money so well that the scholarship fund is still operating on its
original endowment and has the means to cover two years of tuition, travel
expenses plus an additional stipend for more than 200 annual winners,
development officers like the way the Rhodes scholarship trust has few
limitations on who qualifies.
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