Last November, President Gutmann herself contributed .03 percent of this year’s fundraising totals ($150,000). (Mike Ellis/DP)

Cha-ching.

The numbers are in for university fundraising in 2006. The envelope, please:

1. Stanford: $911 million (Dad [Stanford ‘74], if you contributed to this, I hate you)
2. Harvard: $595 million
3. Yale: $433 million
4. Penn: $409 million
5. Cornell: $406 million
6. USC: $406 million
7. Johns Hopkins: $377 million
8. Columbia: $377 million
9. Duke: $332 million
10. UWisconsin: $326 million

Ivies not cracking the top 10 include Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, in part because they’re comparatively teeny tiny schools, and in part because they suck (mostly the latter). And while we may no longer hold the coveted 4th place spot in the US News, we still have something to shout “we’re number four! We’re number four!” about.

Props to Amy Gutmann, who, despite embarrassing photo gaffes, a wave of crime (this time committed by the Penn community instead of against it…ah, progress!), and public speaking skills straight out of the George W. Bush School of Oratory, has continued to rake in buckets of delicious money for Penn, $409 million being a four percent increase over 2005’s take of $395 million. And of course, thank you to all the alumni who so generously gave to Penn, or did so thinking it was Penn State.

All the money raised by the big league makes you wonder how our country’s less absurdly wealthy schools are ever going to catch up to the big boys who only increase their lead with every passing year.

But I have a solution to America’s higher-education injustice.

The Harvard, Yale, and Stanford supposedly “progressive,” so how about they exercise some real “social justice” and share their massive piles of wealth with the schools in need? Surely they would understand and be willing to enact the same wealth redistribution policies on themselves that they so earnestly advocate for the rest of America.

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