New “SOURCE” Tracks Private Money to Higher Ed

A conservative think tank is making it easier to find information about how private money flows to colleges and universities.

On Wednesday, the American Enterprise Institute launched SOURCE (Searchable Open University Records of Charitable Expenditures), an interactive tool that gives users access to a dataset of more than one million grants valued at $90 billion plus, which some 57,000 U.S. private foundations have given to nearly 5,300 higher education institutions since 2008. The database was built by extracting information from 15 years’ worth of publicly available 990-PF forms, the annual return that private foundations file with the Internal Revenue Service. 

Researchers can search by institution, country, funding organization and grant tag—such as athletic, general or research. 

“This information is often difficult to navigate, difficult to read and to the best of my knowledge no one has put together something systematic like this specifically focused on higher education,” Tao Tan, affiliate scholar at AEI’s Center for the Future of the American University, said at a webinar debuting the portal he developed. “What led to [the creation of SOURCE] was three questions: Where is the money coming from and why? What is it funding? And what patterns can we find?”

One of the trends Tan has identified is that both the top funders and the top grantees account for half the awards; the top 165 funders give out 50 percent of the total grants, while 54 of the grantees received 50 percent of the grant dollars. Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities are the top three recipients.