Education Department Releases New Foreign Gifts Data

Foreign nations gave $290 million in gifts and donations to American institutions of higher education between last July and this February, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Education.

Around 270 colleges reported a total of 529 transactions from 131 countries, which totaled about $290 million in foreign gifts over six months. Harvard, Stanford and Yale Universities as well as the University of California campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles received the largest total foreign contributions, according to the department.

Some of the largest single gifts, according to an Inside Higher Ed analysis of the new federal data, came from:

• Saudi Arabia, which gave $12.4 million to Florida A&M University and $12.8 million to Mississippi State University;
• Norway, which contributed $20 million to Stanford;
• Singapore, which gave $16 million to Stanford;
• Switzerland, which gave $10 million to Harvard;
• Hong Kong, which gave $9.4 million to UC Berkeley;
• Canada, which gave nearly $14 million to Brigham Young University;
• South Korea, which gave $7.5 million to Johns Hopkins; and
• Japan, which donated $30 million to UCLA to support a Japanese humanities scholarship initiative.

Colleges are required to report twice a year any foreign gifts and contracts worth more than $250,000, and the Trump administration has promised to crack down on institutions that fail to do so.

Late last month, Trump directed the Department of Education to pursue stricter enforcement of gift reporting to root out “foreign influence” on American campuses. The department then opened an investigation into UC Berkeley, which has another 10 days to provide documentation proving its compliance with the reporting mandate.