10/27/09 Assistant Economics Professor examines donor-college relationship

Lt-Rt: Jonathan Meer, assistant professor of economics, and Harvey Rosen, professor of economics and business policy at Princeton University

You know the stereotypes about college giving. Alums give after their school’s marquee team, football or basketball, wins a conference championship. They give when there’s a family connection to the school. They give when they want their child to get admitted. These assumptions are mostly correct.

But there’s a lot more drama to the donor-college relationship. That’s what scholars Jonathan Meer of Texas A & M and Harvey Rosen of Princeton reveal in a series of papers that make good reading for the college-obsessed.

The authors surveyed tens of thousands of instances of alumni giving between 1983 and 2007 at a highly selective private university they call Anon U. They tracked both frequency and quantity of giving.

Read the full Bloomberg.com article here.