The database grew faster than the donor file

The share of alumni who give fell in every year the survey published it

For decades the Voluntary Support of Education survey, published by the Council for Aid to Education, served as the national ledger of gifts to American colleges and universities. Each winter its press release carried one number that trustees and rankings editors watched: the alumni participation rate, meaning the share of alumni a school can actually reach who made a gift that year. The survey's definition divides the number of alumni donors by the number of alumni "for whom the institution has a means of contact." Graduates the school has lost track of never enter the math, which makes the published rate a generous reading of the full file.

In 2005 the national rate was 12.4 percent. It was 11.8 percent in 2006 and 11.0 percent by 2008. It was 9.8 percent in 2010 and 8.7 percent in 2013. In 2014 it came in at 8.3 percent, and no national participation rate has appeared in a press release since. The fall ran straight through booms and recessions; the 2010 release observed that "alumni participation has been declining annually for many years, though, even when the economy was stronger." When the publishing stopped, about one contactable alumnus in twelve was giving, down from about one in eight in 2005.

The survey's publisher identified the cause in 2009

In January 2009, CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, said: "institutions are increasing the number of alumni records faster than they are increasing the number of alumni donors." The survey's releases printed the arithmetic year after year. For 2007, records grew 4.1 percent while donors grew 1.9 percent. For 2008, records grew 5.3 percent while donors grew 1.0 percent. For 2013, records grew 3.7 percent while donor counts fell 1.7 percent, and the release noted that record counts tend to increase more "even in years when the number of donors increases." For 2014, records grew 7.1 percent, donors grew 1.2 percent, and the rate fell anyway.

Ann Kaplan, the survey's director, wrote in early 2015 that when records grow faster than donors, the participation rate has to fall, and she called that condition "nearly a certainty in recent years when contact information is relatively easy to obtain." The publisher's stated causes were administrative. Address-cleaning software improved. Declining mortality keeps records on file longer. Gifts migrated into donor-advised funds and family foundations, which the survey's crediting rules count toward organizations instead of toward the alumni behind them. Each of these forces works on the size of the record base or on the crediting rules, so the published rate can fall while giving behavior holds still. Between 1988 and 2018, the average number of alumni records per enrolled student rose 66.7 percent, from about four to about seven.

The metric itself was retired between 2018 and 2023

CASE published a replacement framework for measuring alumni engagement in 2018. Its April 2019 research brief said the participation measure "has lost validity over the years" and quoted an assessment of it as "a blunt tool that distracts from core, mission-driven work... a simplistic and inadequate measure..." The brief stated that the framework, once fully tested, would replace alumni participation as the standard measure. Kaplan wrote in the release covering 2014: "Alumni participation does not tell you the whole story about alumni loyalty, and it is certainly not a valid measure of overall quality of an institution..." In May 2023, U.S. News & World Report dropped undergraduate alumni participation from its rankings; CASE's 2025 report notes the removal "does not appear to have accelerated donor losses" but "may be shaping strategy."

The replacement survey counts engagement, and its numbers are smaller

The successor is CASE's Insights on Alumni Engagement survey. In 2024, 394 institutions across 19 countries reported on 60 million contactable alumni. Contactable has a precise meaning in the survey: anyone who is neither marked deceased nor under a full no-contact status and who can be reached by mail, phone, or email. The survey then counts recorded interactions in four modes: communication, experiential (events and programming), philanthropy, and volunteering.

Among institutions reporting three consecutive years, the share of contactable alumni with at least one recorded engagement of any kind has stayed between 19 and 20 percent; in 2024 it was 19.7 percent. Read by mode, communication reached 15.4 percent of contactable alumni, experiential 6.1 percent, philanthropy 4.7 percent, and volunteering 1.2 percent.

If 4.7 percent of contactable alumni have a recorded gift in a year, then one divided by 0.047 is about 21. That is our computation from CASE's published rate. It is conservative, because alumni the institution cannot reach sit outside the denominator entirely. For every alumnus recorded as giving, roughly 20 contactable alumni made no recorded gift that year. The old participation rate and the new engagement rate come from different surveys with different definitions, and the two do not splice into a single trend line. Among the newest alumni the recorded rate is lower: 2.8 percent for those zero to five years out and 2.0 percent for those six to ten years out.

An annual-giving officer opens this file every fall

In September, an annual-giving officer opens the file for the fall appeal. The annual fund she runs is the yearly drive for gifts the institution can spend in the current year, and the appeal starts with the database. At an institution resembling the survey's averages, the screen in front of her holds tens of thousands of live records; the 174 institutions that reported cohort detail in 2024 averaged 29,388 contactable alumni in the zero-to-five-year cohort alone. Every record carries a mailing address, an email address, or a phone number, because that is what contactable means. What did the file produce last year? At the reported rates, about one alumnus in five had any recorded engagement at all, and about one in twenty-one had a recorded gift. She will segment the list, schedule the mailing against reunion season, and call through past donors who stopped, the same disciplined work the field has always done. By the publisher's account, the file has grown faster than the donor list for decades. If her appeal lands exactly at the sector's recorded rate, twenty of every twenty-one contactable names will end the year without a gift.

Fewer than half of last year's donors give again this year

Donor retention is the share of this year's donors who give again the following year. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project, a benchmarking effort of the Association of Fundraising Professionals Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday, tracked 6.7 million donors across 12,504 charitable organizations in 2024. Overall retention came in at 42.9 percent, the fifth consecutive annual decline. Retention of people who gave for the first time in the prior year was 19.4 percent, which the project describes as "one in five donors who were new in 2023 giving again in 2024." History changes the odds: repeat donors retained at 69.2 percent, and donors who had given seven or more times retained at 86.8 percent. The 2025 full-year data moved overall retention from a revised 43.1 percent to 43.3 percent, while new-donor retention stayed, in the project's words, "unchanged at best, negligibly negative at worst." The project's April 2026 release says: "Converting a first gift into a second remains the most consequential unsolved problem in the donor pipeline." A first gift, sector-wide, has about a one-in-five chance of becoming a second.

Total dollars set records while the number of donors falls

Total giving to U.S. higher education reached an estimated $61.5 billion in fiscal 2024, up 3 percent after inflation. CASE's fiscal 2025 key findings then report a record high for funds received alongside a fourth consecutive year of declines in the number of alumni donors. The report's summary line reads: "'Donors down, dollars up' continued to define fiscal year 2025." Median alumni giving per donor rose to $1,895, driven by a shift toward gifts of $1,000 and greater, and the report states that the donor losses "were concentrated among those who gave smaller gifts." It also warns that U.S. higher education "is increasingly reliant on a concentrated group of older donors, while participation among early- and mid-career alumni continues to weaken." The same shape shows up across the wider charitable sector, where the Fundraising Effectiveness Project's 2025 data pairs its strongest revenue growth in five years, 5.0 percent, with a 3.6 percent decline in donor counts. CASE's president and chief executive writes in the 2025 report: "whilst the philanthropic total is increasing, the numbers of donors is shrinking. This is not sustainable over the long term..." The last time the survey printed the two growth rates side by side, in 2014, records were growing at 7.1 percent and donors at 1.2 percent.

Methodology

• Every figure in this piece traces to a primary document verified against a fetched URL or an Internet Archive capture on Aug. 21, 2026. Where case.org and afpglobal.org block direct fetching, the archive captures listed in Sources were used.
• Computed figures, labeled as computed in the text: 1 ÷ 0.047 ≈ 21, stated as roughly 20 contactable alumni with no recorded gift per alumnus recorded as giving; the complement of 19.7 percent engagement, stated as roughly 80 percent with no recorded engagement; and the plain restatements of published rates as ratios (12.4 percent as about one in eight; 8.3 percent as about one in twelve; 4.7 percent as about one in twenty-one).
• The participation series plots only rates printed in CAE press releases. No national rate was published for 2011, and none has been published for any year after 2014; the chart carries both absences. The 2006 rate was printed as 11.8 in the Feb. 2007 release and restated as 11.9 in the Feb. 2008 release; the chart plots the first-published value and notes the restatement.
• Figures that exist only as unlabeled chart lines in CASE and CAE publications (the long participation series back to 1978, the average records-versus-donors count series) are excluded because the publisher printed no numeric values for them.
• The old participation rate (VSE survey) and the philanthropic engagement rate (Alumni Engagement survey) are different metrics with different populations and definitions. They are never spliced into one series in this piece, in its charts, or in its captions.
• CASE's fiscal 2025 national estimate of $78.8 billion reflects an updated estimation methodology and is stated by CASE as non-comparable with the prior series; this piece therefore anchors dollar levels on the fiscal 2024 estimate of $61.5 billion and carries fiscal 2025 through CASE's characterizations and respondent-level figures.
• Fundraising Effectiveness Project figures describe the charitable sector broadly, with higher education included; the project reports ±0.5 percent confidence bands, and its 2025 report revised 2024 overall retention from 42.9 to 43.1 percent with late-arriving data. The exact 2025 new-donor retention rate was described as essentially flat and was never printed; this piece states that absence and estimates no number.
• The annual-giving officer scene is a role composite. Every number in it is published or is a labeled restatement of a published rate: the 29,388 average contactable alumni in the zero-to-five-year cohort (n=174 institutions), the 19.7 percent any-mode engagement rate (n=240), the 4.7 percent philanthropy rate (n=202), and the contactable definition, all from CASE's 2024 Alumni Engagement key findings.
• One claim circulating in this piece's source area could not be verified and is excluded: no published national figure exists for what share of an alumni file receives any outreach at all in a year. CASE measures recorded engagement, and outreach coverage is a genuine gap in the public record.