Gutmann sets billion dollar financial aid goal

The Chicago Cubs, a round trip to the moon and the Solomon Islands — all things Penn could buy by 2020 with the money it will raise for financial aid.

Following the Making History Campaign’s unprecedented fundraising success, Penn President Amy Gutmann recently announced the University’s intention to raise one billion dollars for financial aid by 2020.

“We are continuing robust fundraising centered around the Penn Compact 2020. We’re branding it Penn Impact 2020 because we are committed to showing the impact of what we can do at Penn based on the incredibly generous contributions of alumni and friends,” Gutmann said. “We have set a goal of raising an additional $350 million dollars for undergraduate, graduate and professional student aid bringing the total of what we raise over the 15 years —10 years past and five years forward — to a billion dollars. That is an aggressive goal but we can show real consequences that are incredibly positive for our student body.”

The $350 million breaks down into an additional $240 million in undergraduate aid and $110 million in graduate student aid. Between 2005 and 2012, the University raised $650 million as a part of their Making History Campaign — $360 million for undergraduate financial aid and $290 million for graduate financial aid. As gifts continued to come in, Gutmann extended the campaign to target a total of one billion dollars.

“It’s building on the Making History Campaign’s success,” Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations John Zeller said. “We came off the campaign. We had incredible success, incredible donor engagement and alumni, friends and parent engagement. There’s a continued interest to want to do that. We weren’t going to go into another campaign and this is a focused initiative.”

The University emphasizes financial aid in its fundraising efforts to promote further access, particularly on the undergraduate level. “[Financial aid] continues to be one of Amy’s number one priorities and that is to provide access,” Zeller said. “We had remarkable success during the campaign and there continues to be significant interest in it.”

The new fundraising initiative is coupled with another $900 million fundraising target for faculty support, $600 million of which has already been raised.

“We’ve been working on this for a while. It’s really when it got rolled out this past summer and into the fall that it began to catalyze as a new goal,” Zeller said.

Zeller emphasized that undergraduate and graduate aid are equal priorities, despite the fact that the undergraduate financial aid target is higher. “They are both equal. Don’t take numbers as one priority over the other,” Zeller said. “We obviously would love more than $400 million [for graduates]. Part of it is how much are we able to raise in a five year period of time.”

Financial aid fundraising successes have already resulted in more diverse classes. “By making it clear that our commitment to financial aid is robust we have been able to get more low income early decision applicants,” Gutmann said.

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