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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

> Why wouldn't you instead endow a scholarship for students of your favorite college?

Many people do. They also give money to improve football facilities, bring speakers to campus, and endow a chaired professor position.

> I don't donate to Wal-Mart, so why would I donate to University X?

Because a university is a nonprofit that exists only for the purpose of improving the world. (Not necessarily the employees, who work there as a job, but it's why universities exist.)

You probably don't see a lot of donations to the University of Phoenix or other for-profit universities.

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>Because a university is a nonprofit that exists only for the purpose of improving the world. (Not necessarily the employees, who work there as a job, but it's why universities exist.)

For something like fifteen years of my life I owed well over a hundred thousand dollars of non-bankruptable debt because of the fees this "non-profit" charged.

A "non-profit" university exists for many, many reasons. Giving the dean a million dollar salary is one of those reasons. Student education is likely third or fourth on the list.

"Non-profit" is literally no more than a corporate tax status. That actual charitable causes happen to be non-profit is a coincidence.

Correct. Despite this, I choose to donate to my universities because a) when its my children's turn, I want the organization to remember my name, and b) I honestly believe that education is a truly worthwhile pursuit and I want to expand access to, and quality of, education and discovery. PhDs and grad students may be a bunch of blowhards but they drive a lot of innovation.

> when its my children's turn, I want the organization to remember my name

When it's time for my children, I want the organization that will be teaching them about professional and ethical conduct in the real world to not only not be corrupt, but also demonstrably free of all prejudicial biases in the applications process.

Which is to say, I want my children to be assigned a randomized identifier and their personally identifiable information anonymized, before their application is given to an admissions officer, so that irrelevant qualifications like the amount of money parent alumni have given to the organization are not and cannot be used for an admit/no-admit decision.

I'm fine with your kid getting a 2nd-floor room in the posh dormitory, and first bite at class scheduling. You can pay for additional conveniences, but not to deny someone else an opportunity earned by their own hard work.

Well, okay, so I should stop donating to the scholarship fund then? If alumni stopped donating then quality of education or number of students would have to go down.

If my kids aren't going to get preferential status then there is no reason to be a sponsor of that institution over any other.

Given that your top comment is, "I don't understand why people donate to Universities," I'm not sure that you're in a great position to say that others shouldn't receive priority admission. If everyone did what you did then our University system would collapse.

> "Non-profit" is literally no more than a corporate tax status

It is a tax status (actually, a group of them), but the name has substantive meaning, since to qualify for any of them there must be no one with a claim on the entity’s accumulated earnings.

> That actual charitable causes happen to be non-profit is a coincidence.

It's not a coincidence, it's an actual legal defining characteristic of the kind of nonprofit to which donations are tax deductible.

A non-profit has to show their outflows but it is quite common to have a non-profit where 100% of the money is doled out as taxable income to the board members.

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