This isn’t the right question to ask.
Something that I don’t think most people understand at the level that they should when it comes to contributions and spending is the size of Tennessee’s alumni base compared to other schools in this conversation. One of the reasons that Tennessee was always a fit in the old version of the Southeastern Conference was we had a similar enrollment to every school not named Vanderbilt. Most of the SEC schools, including Tennessee, were in the 25,000 to 35,000 range over the last 20 years. Florida has always been a bit of an outlier, because its enrollment is closer to 45,000.
So when you’re talking about competing against the “big boys“ of college sports, you have to consider that Ohio State’s annual enrollment is 60,000. They have three times as many students, meaning they turn out three times as many alumni on a yearly basis. Penn State has 80,000 students this year. Michigan is 52,000, Texas is over 50,000, Texas A&M has 71,000 students this year. The schools are playing different games over the long-term than we are because they have more people to play the game.
Tennessee fund probably has more updated numbers, but five years ago UT had five billionaire alumni, two of them in the Haslam family. Ohio State had 12 billionaire alums. No idea how many of them donate, but the sheer numbers of it aren’t good for us when you’re making that comparison.
