I aim to find the factors that contribute to alumni giving habits. To do this, I will be using data that covers 18 years of detailed information on alumni and their donations to Middlebury College. By using regression, I aim to explore the factors that contribute to the likelihood of alumni to give and the amount they will give. I also plan to expand on the current literature, by looking into how financial crises affect different groups of people's giving behaviors. I wish to explore how people who do well or are unaffected during a recession react in their giving behavior. Do people realize that others cannot give the support to their alma mater due to the recession, and so they must pick up the slack for their fellow alumni? I hypothesize that they do not, but this is something worth exploring. As far as I have been able to find, there are few, if any other studies that explore these questions.
