Talk to Wooster
Spring 2005
Green Grows Our Endowment
Wooster’s long-term investments are robust enough to nourish a distinctive academic program. But it wasn ’t always that way.
Email Story
It’s a typical afternoon at the College. Senior Delores Williams is
revising a chapter of her psychology I.S. on recovered memories and daydreaming
about law school. Professor Mark Wilson is adding some new resource links
to the Web page for his sedimentology and stratigraphy class. Marco Garcia,
a junior political science major and nose tackle on the Fighting Scots football
team, is brainstorming new initiatives for Proyecto Latino. Professor John
Sell is preparing to meet the director of the Cleveland Art Museum, who
is on campus to deliver a lecture tonight.
A common thread ties these people together: Wooster’s $220 million endowment helps make what they’re doing possible. Williams and Garcia are the recipients of endowed scholarships. Wilson and Sell both hold endowed professorships. Even the museum director is here thanks to an endowed speakers’ fund.
An endowment is a sum of money set aside in perpetuity and invested to produce a return, from which the College draws an annual payout to support a portion of its operations. While it is often thought of as a single pot of money, Wooster’s endowment is made up of hundreds of individual funds, each with its own purpose and history. The funds are pooled for investment purposes but accounted for individually to ensure that each donor’s original intent is honored.
The College has more than three hundred endowed scholarship funds alone. Some give first preference to students from a particular geographic area, those pursuing a particular major, or those who meet other criteria, from the fairly broad ("international students with financial need") to the quite specific ("Christian students of Assyrian descent from Iran or the United States"). Many others are unrestricted.
For Garcia, whose father is a chief master sergeant in the Air Force, receiving the Charles and Roland del Mar Scholarship "has helped tremendously." The second oldest of five siblings, he hopes to work in the public policy arena after graduation.
Endowed funds also are dedicated to purchasing library books, supporting the activities of individual academic departments, underwriting student research, and bringing prominent speakers and artists to campus. Endowed professorships help defray the cost of attracting and retaining top teacher-scholars. One endowed fund even helps care for the campus trees.
This year, endowment income will contribute $10.5 million to the College’s operating budget, about thirteen percent of total revenue. To put that in perspective, without the endowment’s contribution, each student would have to pay almost $6,000 more per year in tuition.
