TO PEG AND GARY WENDLANDT, it’s a simple matter of doing good after doing well.
But in the world of higher education philanthropy, last week’s announcement that the couple are giving $10 million to Holyoke Community College stands out as an uncommon example of donor generosity targeted to the kind of institution that needs it most.
The bequest is the largest amount ever pledged to a Massachusetts community college and among the largest donations ever to a community college anywhere in the country.
“I was overwhelmed with gratitude to have two people with such big hearts and commitment to education recognize how it has impacted their lives and decide they want to pay that forward,” said Holyoke Community College president Christina Royal.
The announcement came one week after word that hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin has donated $300 million to Harvard University, which will rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after him.
The gift from Griffin, a 1989 Harvard graduate, is only the latest in what has become a steady stream of eye-popping donations in higher education, most of them to universities that are already swimming in outsized endowments. Harvard’s $50 billion endowment is the largest by far of any university.
“When you see these large donations to a Harvard or a University of Virginia or a Georgetown, you always say, how much more good could you have done by donating these resources to an institution that has far less?” said Adam Harris, author of the 2021 book The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal―and How to Set Them Right.
That’s exactly how the Wendlandts think of their donation.
“You get more bang for your buck out of the 10 million you give to Holyoke than the 10 million you give to Harvard,” said Gary Wendlandt, who retired in 2010 as chief investment officer at New York Life.
Peg Wendlandt, who grew up in Springfield and attended Holyoke Community College — then known as Holyoke Junior College — said she wants others to have the same opportunity she got thanks to a scholarship.
“I think Holyoke can use it, and use it to help other people, and that’s what we want to do,” she said.
The money, which has been pledged as part of the Wendlandts’ estate plan, will “go toward student scholarships and the college’s greatest needs.”
The donation will increase Holyoke Community College’s current endowment of $20 million by 50 percent.
Harris said in higher ed philanthropy that kind of boost to a college’s finances is termed “transformational.”
“It cannot be overstated how far these dollars will go in helping our students,” said Royal. “This is putting resources where they are most needed to help people get their start.”
Community colleges are the unheralded workhorses of the US higher education system, enrolling 45 percent of all college students, many of them the first in their family to go college. They can put lower-income students on a pathway to the middle class, through their skilled-based programs or by sending them on to a four-year college. But they get very little consideration when it comes to the world of high-end giving to higher education.
“It is incredibly rare that this happens at a community college,” Harris said of the Wendlandts’ donation.
Holyoke Community College said the Wendlandts’ gift rivals a $15 million 2021 gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to Amarillo College, a Texas community college, and a $10 million gift to Arapahoe Community College in Colorado from the Sturm Family Foundation in 2019.
Against the backdrop of regular news of individual donations of 10 times those amounts to elite universities, gifts at that level to community colleges remain noteworthy exceptions.
Of the 72 gifts of $1 million or more to US higher education institutions so far in 2023, according to a database maintained by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Harris said only one went to a community college. For all of 2022, just two of the 290 donations of $1 million went to two-year community colleges.
“For institutions like these that generally have very small endowments, a gift like this can make a huge difference for students,” said Thomas Brock, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University. “If the goal of higher education, at least in part, is to foster greater social mobility, it is community colleges that are serving that function, giving people skills to move into the middle class and even above.”
One third of Holyoke Community College’s 3,500 students, and 44 percent of full-time students, are recipients of federal Pell grants, generally awarded to students whose families earn less than $30,000 per year. Twenty-eight percent of students are Hispanic, and 16 percent are from other minority backgrounds.
The Wendlandts are longtime donors to Holyoke Community College, having already given more than $1 million to the school that Peg Wendlandt graduated from in 1958. She went on to receive an undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a law degree from Western New England School of Law.
Philanthropic giving to colleges and universities has become a case study of the rich getting richer, as the wealthiest universities in the country draw enormous donations.
Griffin’s recent $300 million gift to Harvard isn’t even the biggest ever made to the university, which received individual donations of $350 million and $400 million in recent years.
Last year, venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife Ann pledged $1.1 billion to Stanford University. And in 2018, Michael Bloomberg donated $1.8 billion to his undergraduate alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, earmarked entirely for financial aid.
“People give to places where they have connections, but they are just reinforcing the cycle — those institutions continue to get better and others are left behind,” said Brock, the Community College Research Center director.
While community colleges tend to claim many fewer wealthy alums who are in positions to make big donations, Holyoke Community College has been fortunate.
The founder of Yankee Candle Company, Michael Kittredge, is an HCC alum and donated $1 million in 2003.
Elaine Marieb, a wildly successful textbook author who taught at Holyoke Community College, also donated $1 million to the school, and, following her death in 2018, the college received a $7.5 million donation from the Marieb Foundation, which was then the single largest donation ever to a community college in Massachusetts.
Harris, author of The State Must Provide, said it’s great to see large donations go to community colleges, which he said are in many ways more deserving of such support. But he said it’s important to recognize that public dollars play the biggest role in evening out what has become a very unfair allocation of higher education resources.
“It’s not something that philanthropy on its own can solve,” he said. “It is still incumbent on states to fund these institutions that are doing this incredibly vital work.”
That said, higher ed experts say more giving to community colleges would be a welcome change.
“I would love to see more philanthropists like those here, who are taking a different approach and directing the money to where it’s most needed,” said Brock.
For their part, the Wendlandts are eager to have their example spur others to support colleges that are too often overlooked by big donors.
“If other people latch on to the story maybe it will encourage more of this kind of activity,” said Gary Wendlandt. “That’s really the goal.”