Giving Compass' Take: 

• Michael Bloomberg recently donated $1.8 billion to his alma mater, John Hopkins University, for the purpose of increasing accessibility into the university for low-income students. 

• Is your donation actually solving your intended cause? What is the impact of giving to higher education? 

• Read about Jeff Bezos donation to help undocumented teens go to college.

I am torn about this gift. It’s not the grotesque waste the way that, say, Nike founder Phil Knight’s vanity $400 million scholarship at Stanford or financier Stephen Schwarzman’s $150 million performing arts center at Yale were. Johns Hopkins is dramatically poorer than those schools; Stanford’s 2017 endowment was $24.8 billion, Yale’s was $27.2 billion, while Johns Hopkins had $3.8 billion. That’s not a tiny amount, but it does make gifts to Hopkins a little less egregious.

Bloomberg’s cause is also considerably better than those of Knight or Schwarzman. Knight wanted a pseudo-Rhodes Scholarship with his name on it; Schwarzman thought that Yale — Yale! — really needed more fancy auditoriums. Bloomberg was motivated, he writes in his op-ed, by a conviction that “No qualified high school student should ever be barred entrance to a college based on his or her family’s bank account,” a laudable ideal.

And there’s the rub. While I don’t think this gift is necessarily harmful, it’s a wasted opportunity, for at least two reasons. One, it’s not the best way to use $1.8 billion to further the goal of increasing the number of poor and working-class Americans who can afford to attend and, more important, finish college — a more sensible framing of the cause that Bloomberg is embracing than focusing merely on the admissions process. Two, boosting college completion in the US is probably a worse use of money, from a humanitarian perspective, than some other causes Bloomberg could have chosen.

For the love of God, if you have $1.8 billion to donate, don’t give it to your alma mater.

Read the full article about Michael Bloomberg's donation by Dylan Matthews at Vox.com