Stanford, With Another $400M Donation, Is Out-Fundraising All Other Schools

With a $22 billion endowment, Stanford University is hardly hurting for money. Yet the West Coast school keeps pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, and its fundraising efforts are pulling away from the rest of the nation’s elite schools, including the traditional Ivy League powerhouses on the other side of the country.

Stanford is the most-selective school in the country, admitting about 5 percent of its applicants, making it more difficult to get into than Harvard (5.3 percent), Yale (6.5 percent) and Princeton (7 percent). And for several years now, Stanford has been drawing more financial support from donors and alumni, too. The school’s leaders say it’s because Stanford, in California’s Silicon Valley, is acting like the tech companies that have boomed around its edges, coming up with “bold ideas.”