We all know how much strong financial support could do to a college or university.    U.S. government keeps cutting education funding and many schools are forced to look somewhere else for raising money.

Alumni’s monetary contribution is one of the most effective way of raising funds for many schools.  Source of donations to higher education institutions also includes money from non-alumni, corporations, foundations, and many other organizations.

Below are the top 20 universities with most endowments from their alumni.  Each row below shows the ranking, the name of each top fund-raiser, and the amount it raised in 2014. (Source: by Kaitlin Mulhere, insidehighered.com, 1/28/2015)

Currency: U.S. dollar

  1. Harvard University, $1.16 billion
  2. Stanford University, $929 million
  3. University of Southern California, $732 million
  4. Northwestern University, $616 million
  5. Johns Hopkins University, $615 million
  6. Cornell University, $546 million
  7. University of Texas at Austin, $529 million
  8. University of Pennsylvania, $484 million
  9. University of Washington, $478 million
  10. Columbia University, $470 million
  11. New York University, $456 million
  12. University of California at San Francisco, $445 million
  13. Duke University, $437 million
  14. University of Michigan, $433 million
  15. Yale University, $430.31 million
  16. University of California at Los Angeles, $430.28 million
  17. University of Chicago, $405 million
  18. University of California at Berkeley, $390 million
  19. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, $375 million
  20. Indiana University, $341 million