How I analyzed data to track foreign donations to U.S. colleges and universities
Note: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in which they share their work and thought process. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.
For colleges and universities with the largest endowments — Harvard, MIT and Texas A&M, to name a few — where funding comes from can be a curious question. Even more specifically, though, what foreign countries are donating the most money to United States’ big-name institutions?
For the data journalism class I’m taking with Miguel Paz, I cleaned and analyzed a dataset that provided some insight into this question. In my search for data, I came across the Foreign Gifts and Contracts Report that was released in October 2018. All colleges and universities are required to report gifts from foreign countries totaling more than $250,000 in a given year. The data I found showed foreign donations from 2012 to 2018.
After cleaning the dataset and creating a pivot table for analysis, I found that the schools getting the most foreign funding were no big surprise. Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Georgetown and Duke were among the institutions that received the most foreign money between 2012 and 2018, with Carnegie Mellon receiving over $1.2 billion from other countries.
Qatar gave the most money to U.S. higher education, donating almost $1.4 billion to colleges and universities from 2012 to 2018.
The biggest donors, however, came from countries I didn’t expect. Qatar gave the most money to U.S. higher education, donating almost $1.4 billion to colleges and universities from 2012 to 2018. While other top donors, such as England, made over 2400 contributions, Qatar donated the largest amount of funding in just 423 gifts.
Narrowing down to individual donors in the dataset, I found that most of Qatar’s donations came from just one organization: The Qatar Foundation.
According to the data, the foundation donated $1.2 billion to U.S. higher education. Founded by the ruling Al Thani royal family, the Qatar Foundation has close financial ties with Georgetown, Northwestern and Carnegie Mellon University — three institutions that have facilities on the organization’s multi-billion dollar campus in the country’s capital of Doha. This campus, called Education City, is home to U.S. university programs in computer science, medicine, foreign service and journalism.
Through data analysis and visualization, I learned a bit more about where the top colleges and universities get their funds. Better yet, this gave me a better picture into the connections — and dependencies — that our leading educators have with countries across the globe.
