General Electric has donated almost $74,000 to the University of Colorado at Boulder as part of the GE Fund's Corporate Alumni Program, Chancellor Richard Byyny announced today.
General Electric employees, retirees and directors, who are alumni of CU-Boulder, participate in the program each year. The GE Fund matches alumni donations dollar for dollar.
More than $11 million was donated to institutions of higher learning through the GE Fund in 1999. About 9,500 GE employees in the United States had their contributions to colleges and universities matched by the fund this year.
"The GE Fund has taken a leadership role within the private sector in assisting our nation's colleges and universities with these matching grants," said Byyny. "It's a visionary program that not only benefits the university and our students, but indirectly benefits the donor as well, by preparing tomorrow's workforce for lives and careers in some of the most technical fields now emerging."
Included in GE聮s gift is $50,000 to match a donation received from Howard McCullough, who graduated from CU-Boulder in 1937 and was a vice president with GE. McCullough's $50,000 gift has been directed to the College of Engineering聮s Discovery Learning Center. There are no restrictions on how a university can use the GE funds.
"We're always pleased to see the great commitment of GE employees and retirees to their communities and schools," said Joyce Hergenhan, president of the GE Fund. "It's a privilege to encourage and support those contributions through our matching gift programs."
The GE Fund invented the corporate matching gift program, now used by more than 1,000 corporations worldwide. Since 1954, when the GE Fund began matching employee and retiree contributions, companies have donated more than $2 billion in matching gifts to colleges, universities and other educational institutions.
CU-Boulder currently enrolls about 28,000 students and offers 3,400 courses in more than 170 fields of study. CU-Boulder was recently named the "Most Wired" campus in the Mountain time zone and the 28th most wired campus in the nation, according to the Yahoo! Internet Life survey.