CHINA: Elite universities eye alumni wallets

A decade ago, then-President Jiang Zemin said he wanted to transform China's top universities into world class institutions fit for the 21st century, reports Forbes. But attracting the world's best faculty, funding top-notch research and expanding campuses does not come cheap. So the elite ones are now focused on developing the kind of powerful private fund-raising machines that have made top US universities so rich.

These days, running part of the fledgling education fund at Shanghai's top school, Fudan University, keeps Ye Liu extremely busy. Comparable American universities have several hundred full-time employees working in their development offices. Fudan has 18.

Fresh from visits to eight American universities, including Berkeley, Liu is part of a flood of Chinese university officials eager to learn from successful fund-raising models there. As a vice president of Fudan's education foundation, which will rake in over $16 million in gifts by the end of the month, after operating less than a year, Liu is working to foster a heretofore nonexistent "donation culture" among Chinese university graduates, many of whom are increasingly affluent as a result of their country's economic growth.
Full report on the Forbes site