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A new AI-powered database recently unveiled by a conservative think tank provides a detailed look at how billions of dollars funding America’s universities flows.
The Searchable Open University Records of Charitable Expenditures, or SOURCE, gives researchers and the public access to a detailed record of private foundation funding going to both public and private universities and colleges.
Created and maintained by the American Enterprise Institute, SOURCE organizes roughly 1.1 million foundation grants made since 2008 from 57,000 private foundations into easily searchable and readable results.
Tao Tan, affiliate scholar at AEI’s Center for the Future of the American University and the primary developer of SOURCE, said at a June 24 news conference to unveil the platform that the philosophy behind the project originated from three questions: “Where is the money coming from, and where is it going? What is it funding? And what patterns can we find?”
While Tan repeatedly emphasized that the database itself just presents facts, documents, and information already available online, such as IRS-required 990 forms, he said that interesting findings can be derived from searches.
For example, Tan said he found that the “top 25 funders dominated the core faculty-facing academic mission.”
This is a topic Tan has flagged previously, writing in January for AEI that nearly 80 percent of disclosed private funding for humanities, arts, and social sciences fields comes from just 25 foundations, with many well-known names such as “Mellon, Open Society, Duke, Knight, and Ford.”
“A surprisingly small stream of private money may play an outsized role in shaping academic culture in American higher education,” he wrote.
At the news conference, Tan said certain party affiliations provide widespread funding to more campuses, while others fund fewer campuses, calling this “spreaders versus concentrators dynamic.”
Tan said foundations generally fund universities that align ideologically to have somewhat of a “voice” on the research priorities.
What’s more, larger foundations tend to focus their funding directives on academic missions, while smaller foundations focus on supporting financial aid programs, he said.
Jenna Silber Storey, co-director of AEI’s Center for the Future of the American University, said during the news conference that larger foundations impact the ideological content of the academic mission they support because they have more financial authority.
An op-ed Tan co-authored in Inside Higher Ed on July 1 echoed those sentiments, noting SOURCE details approximately $90 billion in donations and much can be derived from the data.
“The biggest foundations—those that gave more than $100 million across our dataset—pour 71 percent of their grants into the core faculty-facing academic mission, such as research, specific disciplines and capital projects,” he wrote.
“Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of smaller family and community foundations do the reverse, dedicating 76 percent of their funding to financial aid and general operations. A few dominant patrons thus shape what is studied while the many quietly underwrite access and [keep] the lights on.”
The information in the SOURCE database ranges from philanthropic support to tax filings to donor contributions to foundation records.
“SOURCE was built so that journalists, researchers, donors, university leaders, and the general public can pull the same data and reach their own conclusions,” AEI states on its website.
The program is an “entirely exploratory database,” Tan said, adding the use of AI streamlines efficiency and organizes the 1.1 million foundation grants under tags like “athletics,” “research,” and “professional.”
“You get a lot of cheap, automatic [AI] methods to do 90-95% of [the work] … you save human judgement for the part that actually matters,” he said.
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