Aspinall Foundation and CMU merge together to increase scholarship pool by nearly double
The Aspinall Foundation has decided to merge with the Colorado Mesa University Foundation.
This will allow the foundation to support a larger number of students. The merger will more than double the pool of money available for merit-based scholarships.
“This year it would have been about $27,000 dollars awarded in scholarships. Next year it should be around, if the market continues to perform nicely, probably $60,000 dollars,” said Vice President of Development and CEO of the CMU Foundation Robin Brown, who was integral in facilitating this merger.
The move will also make applying for the Aspinall scholarships easier and more accessible. Prior to the merge, any interested students would have to learn about the scholarship and independently apply. Starting next year, it will appear in the CMU scholarship application aggregate.
The merger contribution totals approximately $1.5 million dollars. Half of that came directly from the Aspinall Foundation and the other half is a dollar-for-dollar match made by CMU. The award amount is based on 5% of that total so that the fund can continue to grow and serve even more students in the future.
According to Brown, this choice was made by the Aspinall Foundation Board Members because it will be easier to manage the fund, cut administrative costs and the foundation money was already entirely allocated for CMU.
Named for Congressman Wayne Aspinall, this foundation was established in his honor to award merit-based scholarships to CMU students in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. A dedicated public servant and product of Mesa County Public Schools, Aspinall’s legacy lives on in this endowment.
“The work our organizations have done together in developing this partnership will provide a multitude of new opportunities to engage our community in ways that honor Wayne Aspinall’s legacy and challenge us all to engage civilly with one another,” said CMU President John Marshall during the announcement ceremony.
All CMU funds are managed by a large bank that has been hired by the CMU Foundation. The foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit entity separate from the public institution. The Aspinall Foundation Board will still decide who the scholarship recipients are and CMU will award according to those wishes.
This scholarship endowment is not the first to consolidate its management within CMU, however it is the largest foundation to merge so far. The next largest was the Kiwanis club which added around $100,000 dollars.
“The upkeep of a 501(c)3 is expensive,” said Brown. “It’s a trend we’re seeing now, especially as the FAFSA gets so complicated and a lot of external organizations don’t have access to that and they don’t really understand it.”
The CMU Foundation’s administrative costs are part of the CMU budget. This consolidation cuts out additional operating costs which increases the total amount of funding that can be used for scholarships and educational development.
According to Brown, adding this to the total CMU Foundation endowment enhances overall resilience to changes in the market and increases the total compounded earnings.
The dollar-for-dollar match by CMU came from the net profits of the Hotel Maverick. This has proven to be a valuable financial asset for the school. Earlier this year, nearly $2 million dollars in profit was moved from the hotel into the CMU Foundation for the CMU Tuition Promise.
Mergers like this will facilitate the growth of the endowment in a sustainable and competitive manner. The most recent 990 tax filings list the total endowment value at CMU to be around $60 million dollars.
According to the Denver Business Journal, when compared with schools of similar size and student demographics like Fort Lewis College (FLC) and the University of Northern Colorado (UNC), CMU sits somewhere in the middle of them all in terms of the size of their endowment awards.
FLC reported around $15 million dollars in their endowment fund while UNC reported around $100 million dollars. Elite ivy league schools like Harvard report having around $60 billion dollar endowment funds.
Since 2019, CMU’s endowment has grown by 21%, which is just under the national average of 32%.
“Our community is very generous when it comes to our students,” said Brown. “We wish more [students] filled out the application because we get kids in here in crisis who are like ‘I don’t have any money for college’ and they never filled out the application.”
All CMU students are encouraged to fill out the scholarship application. The general application pairs a student with every qualifying institutional CMU scholarship opportunity and they often take less than five minutes to apply.
Last year, CMU awarded about $4 million dollars in institutional scholarships and this merger, along with the CMU Promise, is likely to increase that number in the coming years.
