The University of Maryland College Park Foundation’s endowment funds grew by more than $25 million from fiscal years 2013 to 2014 — a 10.2 percent change in market value, according to the 2014 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments.
With $273 million in endowment funds in fiscal 2014, this university ranked 253 out of 851 colleges and universities listed in the study released Thursday.
Among Big Ten schools, this university placed last on NACUBO’s list, behind No. 9 University of Michigan, No. 24 Ohio State University and No. 27 The Pennsylvania State University.
Though this university also receives $94 million in endowments from the University System of Maryland Foundation and $104 million from the Common Trust Fund, this university and Rutgers University are the only two Big Ten schools that operate with less than $1 billion in endowed funds.
The money primarily goes to endow chairs for faculty, to fellowships for graduate students, for funding financial aid and to support specific areas of research, said David Silver, the College Park Foundation’s director of financial management.
Schools with big endowments tend to have larger donor bases than schools with smaller endowments, said Ken Redd, research and policy analysis director at NACUBO. This university has the fourth-smallest enrollment in the conference, according to U.S. News and World Report.
In addition, endowments started more recently are likely to be smaller than those at historic institutions that have been building them for decades, Redd said. Harvard University remained at the top of NACUBO’s 2014 list with almost $36 billion in endowment funds.
“Endowments started more recently at universities that don’t have as large a donor base – those two characteristics can explain the difference between a large endowment school and a small endowment school,” Redd said.
The uptick at this university from fiscal 2013 to 2014 can be partially credited to an increase in the College Park Foundation’s staff size, said Peter Weiler, vice president of university relations.
“We, as a university, have got much more impressive in talking up who we are to our alums who support us,” he said. “It’s all about leadership — people believe in the vision the president has for the university and the direction we’re headed and they want to support us.”
Weiler said unlike many other universities in the Big Ten , this university has had only one major fundraising campaign — the Great Expectations campaign, which raised just more than $1 billion from 2006 to 2012.
“We started late,” Silver said. “Most of the Big Ten schools started their endowment much earlier than we did. They’re ahead of the game — they were doing it in the 1960s and ’70s.”
Silver said although he is an alumnus of this university, he can’t recall being asked to donate until about 10 or 15 years ago, when this university “kicked up their fundraising.”
“Those guys — Michigan, Penn State, Ohio State — have been doing it for years and years, and now our goal is to catch up and surpass,” Silver said.
