Determinants of private giving at ranked U.S. universities 2011-2020: A panel data quantile regression analysis

The purpose of this research is to conduct an analysis to identify which variables contribute to student giving to universities in the United States. For this study, data were collected from fifty U.S. universities, most of them in quantile 1 of The Times Higher Education World University Ranking (THE Ranking) list. Also, information from the universities' financial statements and annual reports for the period 2011 to 2020 and information from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). The data were arranged in a panel data structure with a repeated structure for each cross-section. This structure is composed of fifty universities and ten years, as a time period, giving a total of 500 observations. When we perform the corresponding analysis, we can find that the variables that contribute to donations depend on the growth of State GDP, the type of university, university size, state contributions by Full Time Equivalent Students (FTE), the ranking score, tax rebates due to donations. Empirical evidence has also been found in which public universities receive less private giving than private universities. For this research we performed a panel data quantile regression analysis, to more accurately capture the variability of the data because top-ranked universities receive the most donations.