Vanderbilt’s 2025 fiscal year broke the university’s fundraising record with $345 million in new commitments. 

Donations from the 2025 fiscal year supported residential colleges, the Vandy United campaign — a fund dedicated toward financing the Vanderbilt athletics program — and Opportunity Vanderbilt, the university’s financial aid program. Recent donations also strengthened Vanderbilt’s campus expansions in West Palm Beach and New York City, the Institute of National Security and the new College of Connected Computing, among other projects. 

The school received $345 million in new commitments in the 2025 fiscal year and surpassed its goal of receiving donations from 100,000 alumni. Per the university press release, the Dare to Grow Campaign exceeded its $3.2 billion goal twenty months early in January 2025, which contributed to the record-breaking amount raised this year. The Dare to Grow Campaign is a fundraising campaign launched in 2023 and due to conclude in June 2026.  

John M. Lutz, vice chancellor for development and alumni relations, said that alumni helped Vanderbilt surpass their fundraising goal by dedicating their philanthropy work, time, expertise, mentorship and volunteerism. Lutz explained that alumni engagement efforts, such as Alumni Reunion, Family Weekend, Giving Day and school-specific events inspired alumni to support Vanderbilt. 

“[Alumni] are active in bringing the Commodore community together across the world at Vanderbilt chapter events, they provide lifechanging internships for our students, they come back to campus to give guest lectures and they cheer on our student-athletes,” Lutz said in a message to The Hustler. “Alumni are Vanderbilt’s greatest ambassadors.” 

Lutz also described how the allocation of the newly raised funds was decided.  

“When we publicly launched the Dare to Grow campaign in 2023, we focused our efforts on driving support for key areas essential for Vanderbilt to become the great university of the 21st century,” Lutz said. “Our priorities include empowering students and faculty to reach their full potential, advancing groundbreaking interdisciplinary research to tackle the world’s greatest challenges and fostering a culture of radical collaboration, open discourse and free expression.” 

Junior Joshua Jung said he hopes that Vanderbilt will allocate significant funding toward the new College of Connected Computing because it will be accepting its first cohort of graduate students in Fall 2026.  

“Since Vandy raised so much money through a lot of means, I believe that if we want to open up [the College of Connected Computing],  [Vanderbilt] should invest a lot of time and effort and energy into that, especially because computer science is right now in the School of Engineering,” Jung said. “CS is really its own kind of beast to learn. And there’s a lot of different things about CS. And I feel that putting the money into that would make it a lot better.” 

Sophomore Cayden Leslie, a residential advisor in a first-year dorm, said he hopes the increased funding will be directed toward RA’s budgets. The university has not specified whether RA’s budgets will be affected by funding allocation toward residential colleges.  

“I hope that [Vanderbilt] allocate[s] more money for, at least, RAs budgets because our budget is kind of small for the amount of people we’re serving,” Leslie said. “For example, I have almost around fifty residents, but I only have around two hundred dollars, so that’s about three dollars per person, which is not a lot to last for one semester. It’s a bit frustrating sometimes.” 

Lutz expressed gratitude to the Vanderbilt community in reaching the historic milestone, describing the Dare to Grow campaign as “transformative.”  

“Thanks to the incredible generosity and engagement of the Vanderbilt community, we have enhanced support and opportunities for both students and faculty, taken Athletics to new heights, launched the new College of Connected Computing and opened the Roberts Academy and Dyslexia Center, among many other initiatives,” Lutz said. “I am deeply grateful for the incredible support of the Commodore community throughout the Dare to Grow campaign. The campaign may close next year, but we are just getting started.”