Here’s a table from Inside Higher Ed of the top 20 college fundraisers of 2014.

1. Harvard U. $1.16 billion

2. Stanford U. $929 million

3. U. of Southern California $732 million

4. Northwestern U. $616 million

5. Johns Hopkins U. $615 million

6. Cornell U. $546 million

7. U. of Texas at Austin $529 million

8. U. of Pennsylvania $484 million

9. U. of Washington $478 million

10. Columbia U. $470 million

11. New York U. $456 million

12. U. of California at San Francisco $445 million

13. Duke U. $437 million

14. U. of Michigan $433 million

15. Yale U. $430.31 million

16. U. of California at Los Angeles $430.28 million

17. U. of Chicago $405 million

18. U of California at Berkeley $390 million

19. Massachusetts Institute of Technology $375 million

20. Indiana U. $341 million

A few comments:

There’s a bigger difference among endowments than among annual donations. Harvard’s endowment is about an order of magnitude bigger than most of the universities on this list. Presumably the more donations you get, the more you can let them pile up in the endowment rather than immediately spend them, so the rich get even richer.

There’s some periodicity to this list in that schools often do several year long fundraising drives, then take a break before doing them again.

A lot of giving is to medical schools for research. Number 12 UCSF, for example, is nothing but a graduate level health sciences institution.

The year before, Stanford was #1 and Harvard #2.

USC, interestingly, was #3 in both years. USC’s multi-year $6 billion fundraising drive is apparently going quite well.

It’s been six years since USC’s football team went to an important bowl game. Does that suggest football success is overrated in fundraising? Or is USC maintaining momentum with its alumni from its Reggie Bush Era a decade ago, suggesting that cheating your way to temporary success has long term payoffs?

The data comes from the Council for Aid to Education, and most of the reports are not free to the public. But has anybody done moneyball analyses for the public of what pays off and what doesn’t? We hear a lot of theorizing about college sports and alumni donations, and I’m sure colleges have privately crunched the numbers, but have economists or other academics reported for the rest of us on correlations between schools’ various traits and donations?

College football coaches get paid up to, say, $5 million, but college presidents seldom approach that level. Yet, if you think of the college president as a salesman deserving of a commission on the big donations he lands, maybe the most effective college presidents should be paid more than they are now. I know the principal of a private high school who gets paid a half million dollars a year, and is worth it because he routinely brings in huge donations.

This would seem like the kind of thing that would be interesting for people interested in sports statistics to study. Sports statistics have been done to death and it’s hard to make new breakthroughs anymore in analysis without investing in expensive new recordkeeping of second-by-second player movements. But there are a lot of other fields where little moneyball work has been done in public. College fundraising statistical analysis would seem like a natural extension for guys interested in sports statistics.