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Mutual Respect
Starr Foundation gift helps increase endowment for scholarships
WHEN THE GOALS of "The Campaign for Wake Forest" were established, increasing the endowment for undergraduate need-based scholarships was given top priority. Indeed, $125 million of the $600 million campaign is targeted to support the lifeblood of the University: its students and faculty.
Numerous foundations have stepped in to help meet the overall goals of the campaign — complementing the generosity of Wake Forest alumni, parents, and friends — and include the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Jessie Ball duPont Fund.
Wake Forest is pleased to announce another foundation partner to its honor roll of generous donors: The Starr Foundation. Its gift of $500,000, in the form of American International Group (AIG) stock, has been used to create the C. V. Starr Scholarship Fund, which will provide merit- and need-based scholarship support. Wake Forest is one of only 100 educational institutions across the country to receive such a gift.
Since its inception in 1955, The Starr Foundation, one of the country's largest private foundations, has made generous grants in support of education, medicine and healthcare, human needs, culture, and public policy. Education and medicine are the most common recipients of foundation giving.
This permanent scholarship endowment is the result of a Starr Foundation program established in 1980 as a memorial to the Foundation's namesake, the late Cornelius Vander Starr. Starr was an insurance entrepreneur who founded what is now known as AIG, which offers worldwide insurance and financial services. He left his estate to the Foundation when he died in 1968 at the age of 76. The Foundation's assets currently amount to approximately $4 billion.
In fact, this is actually the third gift of the Starr Foundation to the Reynolda campus. Previously, in 1996, the Calloway School received a $10,000 grant for its risk management program. More recently, in 1999, $150,000 was awarded to help endow a fund supporting travel for Wake Forest Research Fellows, those undergraduates who work with faculty on research projects. In addition, in 1990, the Sticht Center at the School of Medicine received $400,000. In all, Starr Foundation support of Wake Forest University amounts to $1.06 million, with over half of that amount going to the Reynolda Campus.
Gladys Thomas, vice president of the Starr Foundation, attributes such partnership to the mutual respect Wake Forest and The Starr Foundation hold for each other. Particularly, AIG companies employ many Wake Forest alumni, and their successful careers at AIG reflect positively on the educational mission of the University.
A key Wake Forest ambassador is Charlie Reid ('65), who is chairman of United Guaranty Corporation, an AIG company in Greensboro. In addition, Jack Padgett ('79), James Farmer ('99), and Jeff Collins ('70) work at United Guaranty. Several other alumni work at AIG companies throughout the United States, including Scott Bihl ('78), Richard Davidson ('79), and Kirk Raslowsky ('86), along with Wake Forest parents David Hupp (P '02), Steve Larado (P '04), and Linda Bern (P '06).
President Thomas K. Hearn, Jr. is pleased that the gift will enable the University to meet a larger portion of need with gift assistance rather than loans. "Keeping indebtedness as low as possible is critical for students facing large amounts of borrowing for post-baccalaureate professional education," Dr. Hearn said, "as well as those graduates who seek careers in lower-paying fields, such as education, ministry, and social work."
Increasing the endowment for scholarship assistance is necessitated by the University's policy of need-blind admissions, which enables Wake Forest to attract students from all economic strata and brings social and economic diversity to the student body. This policy also helps remove cost from a prospective student's consideration of which school is the best personal fit and attracts applicants to Wake Forest who would otherwise not apply. Such a policy connects Wake Forest to its historic constituency. Our "old campus" heritage was that of serving middle- and lower-income students, often the first in their families to attend college.
Unfortunately, this need-blind policy is expensive, and our endowment lags behind that of the colleges and universities with which we compete. Wake Forest is late in the process of building up such endowment funds, particularly because it lacks a 200-year history of acquiring the resources needed to operate at the institutional level at which the University now finds itself — consistently among the top thirty national universities, according to U.S. News & World Report rankings. For nearly 125 years, Wake Forest's development programs were focused on the generosity of the Baptist church, with which Wake Forest was affiliated. Then came the decision to move to Winston-Salem, which exhausted Wake Forest's financial resources for over a decade. Subsequent campaigns have focused on capital projects, such as classrooms and residence halls.
The generous gift from The Starr Foundation helps Wake Forest get closer to the campaign goals for endowing scholarships. The Foundation will not participate in the selection of scholarship recipients, who will be chosen by Wake Forest.
