Dive Brief:
- Cornell University has booked the largest gift in its history — $371.5 million — from the founder of PeopleSoft, the Ivy League institution said Thursday.
- David Duffield’s recent pledge, which comes on top of $100 million that the Cornell alum gave last year, makes Duffield one of “the university’s leading all-time donors,” Cornell said.
- Duffield’s latest donation will create a $250 million Duffield Legacy Fund to help Cornell’s engineering college pursue “strategic opportunities” and a separate $50 million fund to support college priorities under “educational excellence.”
Dive Insight:
With over $470 million pledged to Cornell in less than two years, the university is naming its engineering college after Duffield.
Duffield co-founded software companies PeopleSoft and Workday. He is worth $12.1 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Along with the education and strategic priorities funds, Duffield’s latest gift will also create the Duffield Launch Fund with the remaining $70-plus million. That third fund is to finance investments into immediate priorities of the newly renamed Cornell David A. Duffield College of Engineering. Those priorities include updating the college’s physical infrastructure, bolstering research facilities, and supporting faculty and students.
The engineering college will also use the launch fund to pursue research in fields such as quantum engineering, artificial intelligence, health and data-driven decision-making.
The legacy and launch funds established by Duffield’s donation will allow the college to “remain nimble, proactive and financially responsible as we advance our values and mission,” Lynden Archer, Cornell’s engineering dean, said in a statement. Archer added that the university will announce more specific plans for the funds later.
Cornell’s endowment was valued at just under $11.2 billion at the end of fiscal 2025, according to the university’s latest financials. Over 80% of those funds had donor restrictions tied to them.
The university’s endowment was the 18th largest in the nation, according to the latest study of endowments from the National Association of College and University Business Officers and asset management firm Commonfund.
With 26,561 students in fall 2025, Cornell’s endowment dollars per student came to around $420,000 — well under the $500,000 per student threshold that triggers the minimum endowment income tax created in last year’s massive Republican tax and spending bill.
A post last year from the conservative American Enterprise Institute listed Cornell as among the colleges that “may not be on the hook for the tax right now” but could be later “if their endowment growth continues to outpace growth in enrollment.”
AEI researchers projected that Cornell’s endowment tax liability would jump from $0 in 2026 through 2028 to $14.8 million in 2029 and $16.2 million in 2030.
While off the hook for the endowment tax (for now), Cornell is set to pay the government $30 million over three years per a deal it cut with the Trump administration in November. That payment is in exchange for the administration reinstating $250 million in federal research funding and ending its civil rights investigations into the university.
