Universities will often go to alumni looking for donations, which has become a little awkward. I'm sure it made sense in my parents' generation, when tuition was low and education was undertaken in a spirit of enlightenment.
But today's grads look at it differently. Obviously, many are held back by the fact that they're asked for a donation while still paying down student debt. But even if debt isn’t holding them back, university plays a different part in our lives now.
Today, it's more of a business proposition. The university may not be making a profit on education, but it is charging as much as it can while still remaining a sensible value proposition, much a products on the free market are. Tuition is an investment, that — while expensive — will pay off in the long term. Once you’ve paid a huge amount of money as an expensive long term business investment, You’re less likely to think of that institution as a charity.
It would be like if you bought a car, and it's a really nice car, and you're glad you bought it. But then a year later the car company phones you to ask if you'd care to give them more money. It's like, yes, I like the car, but I paid fair market value for it, so I assumed that was the end of the transaction. It’s not something I think about donating to.
There's lots of things that ask for donations today. I mean, Wikipedia is one biggest ones. It's such an unusual institution to begin with: a widely-used resource that doesn't make a profit or get government grants. So I don’t have any automatic assumptions about giving to it.
In sharp contrast to the University situation, Wikipedia is an institution that you've never given money to through payment for services or through taxes. So its donation requests are unusual: usually charitable giving is purely altruistic, given to a service that others — less-fortunate people — will use. It's not too often that you’re asked to donate for your own sake. The closest parallel is a busker, but you generally don’t choose your buskers. Okay, maybe a better parallel would be a museum with a “recommended donation,” which is kind of what the Wikipedia donation request/guilt-trip is.
(To be clear, I’m not comparing Wikipedia to a University education. I’m aware that the latter is necessarily a lot more expensive than the former)
And now, at this time of the rolling year, many institutions are asking for donations. Not just charities, but also open-source software, and public radio & TV. It’s a reminder of how our world has developed a lot of “free” options that nevertheless need to pay the bills, and non-mainstream media tastes will make it more likely you’ll encounter them. It makes me wonder if this is going to be a viable way of keeping things operating in the future: A labour of love that stays afloat with donations. It’s an odd idea, because we think of donations as going to the less fortunate, in a situation where users of the service are in no position to contribute. But now we’re talking about users paying for their own service, but voluntarily, and hoping that the donations from the wealthy or extra-generous will offset those who can’t or won’t contribute.
Will it work in the long term? I’m skeptical, though some open-source software has been sustained for a while now with a combination of volunteering and semi-self-interested donations from people and corporations. So maybe it can work.
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