Letter from Boston Fund-Raising Efforts By MASAKO YAMADA	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
卒業式で資金集め 雅子さんの通うボストン大学は、5月に卒業式を終えましたが、ハーバード大学やマサチューセッツ工科大学は、ちょうど今が卒業シーズンです。ボストンの町には新卒者の家族や友人ばかりでなく、大学の OB、OGが大勢集まります。大学側はこの時期に同窓会を開催し、卒業生から寄付金を募ります。

The Boston University graduation ceremony was held in May, at around the same time as most other colleges. MIT and Harvard are known to have commencement later and they send off their graduates in the beginning of June. I've noticed increased pedestrian activity around Harvard Square in the past few days. This is due to the number of people visiting campus for commencement.

This flood of people does not consist solely of the friends and families of new graduates. I must have seen at least 10 people around Boston and Cambridge carrying souvenir tote bags with the characters "Harvard 1995" printed on them. Some of the people carrying these bags made a bit of an effort to hide the logo, but they were unmistakably Harvard alumni.

Commencement season is the season for official class reunions. Students are free to plan their own reunions, but many colleges plan formal reunions every five years for graduates. The alumni visit their old schools during commencement week and engage in activities planned by university reunion committees.

These reunions offer a great opportunity for alumni to catch up with old friends. However, it is not all fun and games. It is no big secret that many people go to these official reunions to do some serious networking. The colleges don't plan these large events for the sole purpose of making their alumni happy, either: Reunion time is also time for the colleges to ask alumni to open up their wallets.

Although the cost of a college education in a private university is extraordinarily high in the States, it is well known that most universities cannot rely on tuition alone to balance their budgets. Even if all the students could pay the full amount (many students can't, so they get loans and scholarships) universities cannot cover all expenses with that level of money.

The deficit must be covered by government and corporate grants — and personal grants from individuals. These grants tend to cover large purchases, such as building labs, buying land or setting up new computer systems.

Many large university projects are spearheaded by wealthy alumni. The alumni don't have to be as rich and famous as Bill Gates to make a difference, though. It is well known around BU that the area in front of the chapel had been getting a bit raggedy over the years, and enough funds were col lected from alumni to renovate the area this year.

A few enthusiastic individuals were responsible for starting the campaign. Many non-wealthy alumni joined in the fund because of this initial push. Now the plaza is paved with beautiful marble tiles and the old sculpture in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been refreshed.

The good thing about alumni donations is that they can be collected quickly and earmarked for a very specific purpose. I doubt that kind of money would have been allocated so quickly by the university administration for a non-emergency cause, especially if it had to dip into tuition money. Parents work hard for their kids' tuitions and I think they'd prefer to see their money go to classroom facilities or to professor salaries.

Recently, I've been working with some fellow graduate students to start a travel grant for graduate students at BU. Many graduate students cannot afford to go to academic conferences and this is a great disadvantage to them, since conference attendance ultimately leads to job offers.

This is also a disadvantage to the university, since universities benefit when their students excel. We wanted to see if there was any way we could offer scholarships to these students.

The university administrators we talked to were not thrilled with the idea of allocating this money out of their own limited budgets. However, they agreed to help us organize an alumni fund so that we could ask alumni for donations. They have even agreed to help us write and send letters to all the relevant alumni in their database so we don't have to look up names or print out envelopes.

Thousands of these letters will be sent out within several months. I suppose I'll see firsthand how effective this form of fund raising is when the responses come in.

Shukan ST: June 23, 2000

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