Johns Hopkins Gets $50 Million Gift
Donation to Help Establish
Separate Graduate Schools
For Business and Education
By SALLY BEATTY
December 5, 2006; Page A8
Johns Hopkins University said it received a $50 million gift from trustee emeritus William Polk Carey to launch its first graduate school of business, a move that underscores the growing financial importance of business schools to universities.
The university, based in Baltimore, said it is splitting in two its existing School of Professional Studies in Business and Education, creating the new Carey Business School as well as a separate graduate school of education aimed at addressing "the most pressing" needs of the nation's public schools.
The existing graduate business program at Johns Hopkins is small and targets mainly part-time students. As a result, said university President William R. Brody, "we have not had the [financial] halo effect of a business school." Business schools can be lucrative for universities, bringing in both high tuition revenue and substantial gifts from graduates.
Johns Hopkins plans to differentiate its business school from other established M.B.A. programs by taking an interdisciplinary approach, leveraging its strengths in medicine and science.
Earlier this year, Johns Hopkins received one of the biggest philanthropic gifts of 2006, an anonymous, $100 million donation to support work in medicine, public health and the humanities. People close to the situation say it came from Michael Bloomberg, New York's mayor and an alumnus. In 2005, Johns Hopkins's endowment ranked 24th among all U.S. universities, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Its endowment stood at $2.35 billion as of June 30, while No. 1-ranked Harvard's endowment was $29.2 billion.
Unlike business schools, education schools tend not to be big revenue generators, in part because teachers usually don't accumulate major wealth. But the university said its new School of Education is financially viable on its own, helped in part by increased funding for education research and a part-time masters program.
Mr. Carey, 76 years old, is chairman of W.P. Carey & Co., a New York-based real-estate investment firm. He attended Princeton University and graduated from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Although he has donated to both those universities, his giving has tended to be driven by family ties; in 2003, Mr. Carey gave $50 million to Arizona State University, which a grandfather helped found, to endow the W. P. Carey School of Business. He never attended Johns Hopkins but similarly is related to the school's founder, and served as a trustee from 1992 to 2000. In an interview, Mr. Carey said he hoped the gift would boost Baltimore's economic revival.
Write to Sally Beatty at
sally.beatty@wsj.com
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