Corporate giving to education during economic downturns: General trends and the difficulty of prediction

Analyzing Three Decades of Philanthropic Giving to U.S. Higher Education (1988–2018)

“…In contrast, there is little academic research examining corporate philanthropy's implementation within higher education (Clevenger, 2014) and the extant studies usually explore (and find) connections between corporate higher education philanthropy, economic conditions, and social perceptions (Leslie, Drachman, Conrad & Ramey, 1983;Leslie & Ramey, 1988). Looking at data over forty years (1967-2007), Van Fleet (2010 found that while gifts in absolute dollars declined during economic downturns, corporate giving as a percent of pre-tax profits stayed relatively stable. Cheslock and Gianneschi (2008) argued that higher levels of state appropriations would generate additional opportunities for corporate benefit and indeed found that corporations contributed more to institutions that received more in state dollars (in a national data set between [1994][1995][1996][1997][1998][1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004].…”