The Importance of Endowment

Comparisons among OSU and its peers illustrate both the importance and potential impact of The Campaign for OSU.

Today, a university must have a healthy endowment to maintain a program worthy of national and even international recognition. At just over $380 million, OSU's endowment lags far behind those of many of its peers in the Pac-10. Nationally, multi-billion- and billion-dollar endowments are becoming the norm.

Nearly one-third of OSU's total campaign goal focuses on raising our endowment. Although all gifts are important, gifts of endowment are particularly valuable because they are invested for the long-term, creating a permanent source of funding for ongoing priorities such as scholarships, faculty chairs, and programs.

Over the long-term, the OSU Foundation has earned an exceptionally high rate of return on endowment funds, routinely outperforming many of the leading investment indicators, such as the S&P 500.

OSU's graduate program in nuclear engineering was recently ranked among the nation's top 10 by U.S. News and World Report, and programs in geosciences and zoology at OSU were both ranked sixth nationally according to Science Watch and The Chronicle of Higher Education, respectively.

The Carnegie Foundation included OSU among a select group of universities -- just 95 out of more than 3,000 nationwide, and the only one in Oregon -- that received its top designation for "very high research activity."