Education

Annual giving to George Washington University increased 9 percent in 2011, with annual donations to the university topping $5.3 million as of June 6.

Annual giving — all directly solicited gifts of up to $25,000 — represents 5.7 percent of the $92 million raised by GW so far this year. Complete fundraising totals will not be calculated until after the end of the fiscal year, June 30.

Last year, giving reached $4.8 million, up 14 percent from 2008.

Although annual giving rose, overall fundraising remains comparable to last fiscal year, when GW took in $93.82 million.

Certain ideas make so much sense that one wonders why no one thought of them sooner. Case in point: Global leaders struggled for decades to think of a way to improve education. Ten years ago, Fred Mednick, Ph.D., started his nonprofit aimed at supporting those who can best provide that education.

The Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp. announced a joint commitment to support efforts to increase the number of Washington students earning bachelor’s degrees. The state’s two largest private employers are pledging $25 million apiece over the next five years to the new public-private Washington Opportunity Scholarship program and endowment signed into law by Gov. Christine Gregoire. Together with matching state contributions under the new program, this will raise $100 million for scholarships for low- and middle-income students, as a first step toward creating a billion-dollar endowment by the end of this decade.

The federal government is trying to make it easier to apply for one of its grants for innovative ideas to improve education. But with budget cuts there’s a lot less money to give away this year. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education gave out $650 million to 49 school districts, charter organization, colleges, universities and other nonprofit organizations with entrepreneurial ideas for improving the nation’s schools. The U.S. Department of Education is announcing Friday that this year there’s $150 million available for the second round of Investments in Innovation, or i3 grants.

The average cost of attending a four-year for-profit college surpassed expenses at both U.S. state and private nonprofit universities, a government report found.

Full-time students paid an average of $30,900 annually at the for-profit schools in the 2007-2008 academic year, almost double the $15,600 average paid at public universities, according to U.S. Education Department data released and included in The Condition of Education report. The average cost of attending a private nonprofit college was $26,600, the study said.

The Obama administration plans to spend $500-million to help states expand innovative early-learning and child-care programs, the bulk of which are operated by nonprofits.

The new fund, called the Early Learning Challenge, will consume most of the $700-million that was allocated by Congress in April for Race to the Top, the grants program to help states improve the quality of their schools.

Like previous Race to the Top competitions, the Early Learning Challenge will award grants directly to states. The program will be administered jointly by the Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services.

Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania are leading a rebound in contributions to colleges as donors who held back during the recession are writing checks again following two years of a rising stock market.

Gifts to universities will probably increase 5.7 percent in the fiscal year ending June 30, after slumping the past two years, said John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. At least six schools got donations of $100 million or more this year, including the University of Pennsylvania, which said on May 11 it received $225 million for its medical school.

Bard College, a small liberal arts institution in the Hudson Valley, has received a $60 million gift from the Open Society Foundations in recognition of its global involvement, which includes programs in New Orleans, Nicaragua and Russia, officials are to announce on Tuesday.

The gift from Open Society, which George Soros created in the 1980s to foster democracies around the world, will help the college bring its disparate programs under a new umbrella, the Bard College Center for Civic Engagement, and assure their continuing operation and growth.

The Shalem Center announced that it has received a $12.5 million challenge grant from the Tikvah Fund to help establish Israel’s first liberal arts college. The grant, intended to galvanize other major philanthropists to support the launching of Shalem College, provides a one-to-one match for gifts that are received during the college’s first four years. Shalem’s application for accreditation from Israel’s Council for Higher Education is pending, and it is anticipated that the college will open in fall 2012.

The University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday received a record gift of $225 million for its School of Medicine from Philadelphia philanthropist Raymond G. Perelman and his wife Ruth.

Perelman signed the papers finalizing the gift on Tuesday at the home of University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann, he said later Tuesday.

The gift benefiting the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, as it will now be known, had been in the works for about a year, Perelman said.