The Council for Aid to Education reports in its annual Voluntary Support of Education Survey that private giving to colleges grew by 6.3% in 2007 to a record $29.5 billion. The rich continue to get richer, with the Top 20 colleges raising 25.8% of the private donations to higher education:

1. Stanford $832,344,826
2. Harvard $613,985,000
3. USC $469,646,622
4. Johns Hopkins $430,455,336
5. Columbia $423,849,107
6. Cornell $406,925,075
7. Pennsylvania $392,420,770
8. Yale $391,315,420
9. Duke $372,328,154
10. UCLA $364,779,738
11. MIT $329,158,304
12. Chicago $328,328,020
13. Wisconsin $325,336,779
14. University of Washington $300,199,601
15. Michigan $293,403,123
16. Minnesota $288,750,059
17. NYU $287,587,458
18. Virginia $282,610,619
19. Indiana $278,553,274
20. University of California at San Francisco $251,945,342

Here is the full list of giving to colleges, arranged by state.  Among the trends noted in the study are:

• Alumni giving declined by 1.5%
• Gifts from foundations increased by 19.7%, to $8.5-billion
• The percentage of contributing alumni decline from 11.9% to 11.7%

For further discussion, see Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.