Randolph College reports spike in donations

Donations to the former Randolph-Macon Woman's College plummeted last year after the school announced that it would become coeducational.

Now, halfway into its first year as a coeducational school, Randolph College has more than doubled the amount of giving compared to last year, school officials said Monday.

From the start of the fiscal year in July through the end of January, the school had received $7.6 million in total giving, said Skip Kughn, vice president for institutional advancement.
At the same point last year, when giving was at a 12-year low, the school had raised $3.4 million, he said.

Most years, the amount of giving is between those two levels.
Donations to the school's unrestricted annual fund, which is included in the total, are up about 15 percent, Kughn said.

"This year (the school received) the largest amount in gift income through January in at least the last 11 years," he said.
On top of that amount is a recent pledge of $1 million over five years by alumna and trustee Kitty Caldwell and her husband Hacker.

"We hope that this gift will inspire others," Kitty Caldwell said Monday. "We're excited about the college … It's definitely at a crossroads, but we feel very confident in its strong leadership."
"The college gave a lot to me - it was a place where I was formed … for me, we can't really expect that this great educational experience will continue without putting the resources behind it."

Along with monetary donations, the percentage of alumnae who have given to the school is up, too - 12 percent from last year, Kughn said.

In previous years, the school has ranked high in terms of giving per student, he said.

A newsletter from the 2003-04 school year states that 41 percent of alumnae donated to the college, ranking the school 17th in the nation in alumnae giving per student.

"This year, it's going to be exceptionally high again," Kughn said. "We still have five months to go in the fiscal year, so we should have a very strong gift-per-student ratio this year."

Even so, alumnae still remain who have said that they will not give to the college because it went coeducational.

Misti King Elting, a 1995 alumna, said she's not the only one who "will never come back into the fold."

"There are people that still send e-mails back to the college saying, 'Nope, I'm still angry; nope, I'm not giving,'" she said. "There's plenty of them out there who still won't give."

Much of the reasoning for that, Elting said, stems from feelings that money alumnae previously donated can no longer be used as it was intended - for a woman's college.

Anne Yastremski is an alumna and executive director of Preserve Educational Choice. The nonprofit organization is funding litigation against the college, some of which is based on the idea of donor intent.

The organization has raised more than $1 million for those lawsuits, Yastremski said, and much of it came from alumnae who otherwise may have given the money to the college.

Brenda Edson, spokeswoman for the college, acknowledged that some alumnae remain who will not give to the school.

"I think that it's a work in progress. It's such a personal decision," she said. "There are always going to be alumnae who aren't happy because of the coed decision. And that's understandable, but I think others have come back and seen what's going on and where we're heading, and they've been reassured, maybe, to some degree."