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Columbia Business School, shown above, is one of several graduate and undergraduate business programs where interest in philanthropy is growing.
When Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen first started teaching a philanthropy course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2000, she quickly discovered she was a pioneer in the field. There were just a handful of case studies on the topic and few, if any, teaching materials, she says. As a result, it took her about a year-and-a-half to design the curriculum for it.
Ten years later, the landscape has drastically changed. Arrillaga-Andreessen has since published 25 case studies about philanthropy. This fall she will publish a book entitled Giving 2.0, which she hopes will serve as a resource for students engaged by the topic. Interest in her class has surged at Stanford and she now offers an undergraduate course, too. Says Arrillaga-Andreessen: “Almost every year, I’m oversold.”
She’s not alone. Today, dozens of MBA and undergraduate programs teach philanthropy as an academic subject, exposing students to both the art and science of giving. Some schools—including Stanford, Columbia Business School, and the Boston University School of Management—teach entire courses focused solely on the topic, while others weave philanthropy into the curriculum of social-enterprise courses. The topic appeals to business students because many may wish to serve eventually on the boards of nonprofits or become philanthropists themselves, professors at those schools say.
According to the Aspen Institute’s most recent Grey Pinstripes report, a biannual survey of business school education, 36 of the world’s business schools now offer philanthropy-related courses. The movement has also taken off at the undergraduate level. According to Campus Compact, a national coalition of universities and colleges that promotes civic engagement, there are approximately 100 courses offered across the country on the topic. Many classes give students a set amount of money that they can donate to local nonprofits in their community, says Maggie Grove, a special-projects consultant for Boston-based Campus Compact. This makes them popular with students and many have wait lists, she notes. “Students are embracing it because it is active learning,” Grove says. “Students want opportunities that allow them to make an impact in their community.”
The Ohio Campus Compact office runs the U.S.’s largest university philanthropy program, Pay it Forward, a federally funded service-learning program offered on 33 college campuses in Ohio, Michigan, and Kentucky. Every course selected to participate in the program receives a certain amount of money—for the past two years, $4,500 annually; students spend the semester determining how to award the money to local nonprofits and devoting at least 15 hours volunteering at one.
Business students have been keen to participate in the classes. In the 2010-11 academic year, more than 34 percent of all students participating in the Pay it Forward program were business majors. Thirty of the 74 courses offered were either in business or in business-related fields such as grant writing or leadership, says Pay It Forward Project Director Kirsten Fox. Together these courses contributed about $137,00 and more than 12,000 student-volunteer hours to nonprofit groups.
“How many business students are out there hoping to be the next Bill Gates?” Fox says. “These things are exciting to them because they see them happening outside of academia, but they can make it happen in the classroom.”
That was the case for Kelsi Fawley, 21, a business major who took a class called the Principles of Management last spring at Otterbein College, a private, liberal arts school in Columbus, Ohio, that received one of the $4,500 philanthropy grants from the Pay it Forward program. Fawley belonged to a team of five students who spent the semester advocating that funds go to nonprofit Equine Assisted Therapy, a therapeutic riding program for youths with disabilities.
