On the rise: The UK’s top philanthropists and higher education
Sunday Times, 16 May 2020
Today we publish our research on university funding by the UK’s top 200 philanthropists. This is the second year we have undertaken this study.
Each year since 2005 the Sunday Times, in partnership with the Charities Aid Foundation, publishes its annual Giving List. The index is published at the same time as the Sunday Times Rich List. In other words the Rich List looks at the UK’s wealthiest citizens and residents; the Giving List looks at the most generous of the wealthy.
What does the Giving List tell us?
The Giving List is important because it does two keys things:
First, it ranks major donors according to the proportion of their wealth they give away. It distinguishes those, who are giving away, say, 30% of their wealth against those who give away, say, 0.01% of their wealth. This is useful because many wealthy people badge themselves on a website or Wikipedia as a philanthropist, but actually give away really very small sums of money compared to their wealth. The more generous the donor, logically there is a greater opportunity to benefit from their goodwill.
Second, it is an important measure of both philanthropic giving and provides a very useful insight into philanthropic trends. The key headline the Sunday Times and the Charities Aid Foundation reported in its 2020 study was that fewer people in general are giving, but those who do are giving larger amounts. In other words, major donors are giving away more money.
This assessment confirms an emerging and very clear pattern. The rise in philanthropy appears to mirror the significant rise in accumulation of wealth by High Net Worth Individuals. (HNWI) According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development, HNWI wealth ballooned from US$28.8 trillion to US$63.5 trillion between 2013-16. A study published in August 2019 shows that the total wealth of the Top 1000 Richest in the UK has boomed from £519bn in 2014 to £771bn in 2019. The charitable assets of the 200 philanthropists that feature in the 2020 Giving List are valued at £23.56 billion. Their philanthropy is informed by a significant pot of funding.
Higher education funding on the rise
Courtesy of the Charities Aid Foundation
The Sunday Times Charities Aid Foundation 2020 Giving List – and the accompanying analysis which was published in the Sunday Times on 16 May 2020 – focused heavily on the emergence of higher education as an area of giving for the UK’s leading philanthropists.
According to the compilers of the report, higher education is seeing a steep rise in giving from philanthropists. And a quick scan of their survey suggests that 54% of the top 200 philanthropists are reported by the Sunday Times to prioritise their giving to education, including higher education. This echoes a well-known patten in philanthropy, which is that education features very highly among philanthropists.
The Harvard UBS 2018 Global Philanthropy Report – probably the most comprehensive piece of research undertaken into global giving – concluded that 35% of nearly 30,000 foundations studied direct resources towards quality education initiatives. Education is often viewed as the key to both individual opportunity and achievement, and as an engine of national economic prosperity. Encouraging news for universities and their fundraising or institutional advancement teams, then.
Mark Greer, head of private clients at CAF and one of the authors of the Giving List 2020, reports there is a clear increase in philanthropists giving to higher education, saying that the “American tradition seems to have taken hold here as universities adjust to an environment with significantly less public funding. Given the challenges that universities will no doubt face following the coronavirus pandemic, this move to supporting higher education with significant gifts could not come at a better time for so many of the UK’s institutions.”
The study itself doesn’t really provide much detail or context about giving to education, and particularly to universities and higher education institutions. It merely provides a long list of funders and the principal causes they are funding. So we have taken the liberty of undertaking a subset of research into funding to the higher education sector by the 200 philanthropists listed in the Giving List.
Family foundations on the rise
The first thing to report is that 90% of the leading philanthropists covered in the Sunday Times Charities Aid Foundation Giving List have established dedicated charitable foundations through which to channel their giving. No longer are philanthropists simply signing a cheque; they are formalising their giving, establishing charitable (and sometimes company) structures through which to channel their giving. We identified 180 such foundations associated with the leading 200 philanthropists. This is important since annual reports provide insight into who and what these philanthropists are funding.
Education, education, education
“Clearly, something is happening among the leading philanthropists that is prompting them to give more of their money to universities and higher education institutions.”
The next thing worth pointing out is that from our research 66 out of the top 100 philanthropists have given to universities and higher education institutions over the past 6 years – both in the UK and overseas. Of those, we know that at least 50 percent (33 out of 100) have given £609m to non-UK universities in the past six years. And, just as Mark Greer and the authors of the Giving List conclude, there is a clear rise in giving to higher education. In 2014, the 200 philanthropists in the Giving List made donations of over £45m to 60 non-UK universities; by 2018, over £256m was donated to 96 non-UK institutions.
Clearly, something is happening among the leading philanthropists that is prompting them to give more of their money to universities and higher education institutions. The key headline of our research is that 28 percent of the leading 200 philanthropists identified in the Sunday Times Giving List (55 in total) have made 578 donations to 228 non-UK universities in 39 countries amounting to £640m over the past six years.
Trophy donors
Different donors to universities are behaving in different ways. There are some who you could be characterised as a trophy donor. This is someone who makes large-scale one-off donations which is accompanied with a flourish of media excitement. Cynics might point to the $200m donation made by the Anglo Ukrainian businessman Len Blavatnik to Harvard Medical School as an example. Sir Len features at #80 in the 2020 Giving List. Some commentators viewed the Harvard donation as an indulgent act of self-promotion or even as a political act which was helpful to the Kremlin.
Personally I view these suspicions as unreasonable. There can be no doubt Sir Len makes statement donations through his philanthropy – he donated $50m to Harvard in 2013 and pledged £75m to Oxford in 2015. But Sir Len, through his Blavatnik Family Foundation has long demonstrated a pattern of giving to universities over much of the past decade which suggests there is a genuine effort on his part to further the cause of education. According to our study, Sir Len has made 45 donations to 16 universities in Ireland, Israel and the US, totalling £220m from 2014-18 (unfortunately we do not yet have a complete set of data for his giving in 2019).
Another example of a trophy donor, it could be argued, is Samuel Tak Lee. The Anglo Hong Kong businessman made a donation of $118,000 to his alma mater the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2015. It was a big donation prompting significant media coverage. Mr Tak Lee dropped out of the 2020 Giving List having featured at #110 in 2019.
However, trophy donors rarely make such large-scale one-off donations. An analysis of both Sir Len’s and Samuel Tak Lee’s charitable accounts suggest these pledges are followed by donations spread over a period of years.
Prolific philanthropists
Another type of donor is one who spreads his or her funding widely. The California-based Briton Sir Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman feature at #20 in the 2020 Giving List. If you Google his name and university, significant donations to the universities of Oxford and Chicago will pop up. He conforms, it seems, to the pattern of the trophy donor.
It is certainly the case that the University of Chicago is the third biggest recipient following a pledge of over £40m by Sir Michael and his wife in 2016. However, Sir Michael and his wife have become – over the past six years – what I would call a prolific university philanthropist. According to our study, they have given to the widest number of non-UK universities. Their San Francisco-based CrankStart foundation has given 111 donations to 54 universities amounting to £43m over the past six years. All are US institutions.
The interesting thing about Sir Michael and Harriet Heyman is the journey they are on in terms of university giving. In 2014 Sir Michael gave to three non-UK (US based universities, by 2018 (latest figures available) their giving jumped to 50 institutions. Something happened in the run up to 2016 which affected their decision about what and how they prioritise their giving, and higher education funding emerged as their preferred expression of family philanthropy.
There are other examples of a prolific university philanthropist. Take Alan Parker. Through his Oak Foundation, Alan Parker has made 63 disbursements to 41 universities in 11 countries totalling over £27m. There is a strong African-focus in his giving patterns.
Meanwhile, Lord Rothschild has donated, by our calculation, to 37 European universities since 2014 through his Rothschild Foundations.
Secret sponsors
And then there are very discreet philanthropists who tend to avoid transparency, and tend to avoid putting information into the public domain about their giving. It is the case that there are philanthropists in the 2020 Giving List who we know have given to non-UK universities but where they have not disclosed details (so our research is a conservative analysis and does not reflect all non-UK university philanthropy). These secret sponsors include David and Heather Stevens, Alisher Usmanov, Sir Ronald Cohen and Sharon Harel, Mo Ibrahim and, perhaps most intriguingly, Clive Calder.
The Anglo South African businessman Clive Calder may be one of the most influential philanthropists you have never heard of. Founder of Elma Philanthropies, Clive Calder appears – by our research – to be biggest donor to African universities who features on the 2020 Giving List (#183). In what appears to be a registration in the British Virgin Islands, Elma Philanthropies publicises its activities but it does not disclose how much it disburses. However, our analysis of the Elma Philanthropies website suggests it has given to at least 23 universities since 2014, 17 of which are in Africa. From the evidence we have found out about Elma funding to universities, Clive Calder’s giving is likely to run into the tens of millions of pounds.
Who benefits from the UK’s most generous philanthropists?
“28 percent of the leading 200 philanthropists identified in the Sunday Times Giving List have made 578 donations to 228 non-UK universities in 39 countries amounting to £640m over the past six years.”
Well, in short, US institutions are the preferred destination for UK giving to foreign universities. 107 universities received £376m between 2014-19, representing 59 percent of all donations to non-UK overseas universities.
63 European universities received £187m or 29 percent of giving. Norway and Germany are the preferred destination of UK giving to European universities. The reason Norway features so strongly in our research is, primarily, because of the university funding from Trond Mohn. Trond Mohn and his family appear at #60 in the Giving List Index. From our research of his Mohn foundation, Mr Mohn has given £167m in the past six years to a number of Norwegian universities.
The top five destinations for university giving by leading philanthropists are:
United States (£376m)
Norway (£167m)
Israel (£47m)
Hong Kong (£14m)
Germany (£5m)
Our methodology
The purpose of our research was to identify giving to non-UK universities by the UK’s most generous philanthropists. UniversityPhilanthropy.com and The Cape Partnership drew on the Sunday Times 2020 Giving List published in May 2020 as the basis.
Essentially, our research is an open-source exercise in identifying reported giving to universities either by the individuals directly or by means of a charitable trust which they have established to channel their philanthropy. Data about giving by the UK’s top philanthropists through their charitable foundations is available at the website of the charity regulator, the Charity Commission for England and Wales, and the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.
The Charity Commission for England and Wales and the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator are non-ministerial government departments that regulate registered charities in Great Britain. All registered charitable foundations and trusts are required to file annual reports annually. Most - but not all – provide details of the recipients of donations. Our analysis was augmented by desk research.
While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this data, it does not necessarily represent a complete picture of all giving by the philanthropists identified in this survey. As I have said, the charitable accounts for 2019 for US-based British philanthropists - notably Sir Len Blavatnik and Sir Michael Moritz - have yet to be published, and that will likely revise the figures upwards, and by some margin.
The research was completed in October 2020.