Overview of the Haas Annual Fund

Established in 1978 by Dean Emeritus Earl F. “Budd” Cheit, the Haas Annual Fund is the foundation of support for excellence at the Haas School of Business. The resources generated by the Haas Annual Fund make up an integral component of the total dollars raised annually from private gifts.

The Haas Annual Fund works directly with alumni and friends to invest in the success of Haas by maximizing the support of public higher education, seeding new initiatives, and maintaining the school’s status as one of the premier business schools in the world. In 2007-2008, the Haas Annual Fund broke its own record for the 6th straight year, raising $3,072,184 from over 4,300 donors.

1. Unrestricted

Alumni services, Haas@Cal, learning workshops, and career networking events for students and alumni are all supported by the Haas Annual Fund. This provides the foundation for maintaining and growing excellence.

2. Undergraduate Programs

A large portion of the Haas Annual Fund supports undergraduate teaching, as well as the internal and external Case Competitions and, most recently, dedicated career services for undergraduates. Your gift provides an immediate and direct impact on future generations of leaders.

3. Graduate Programs

In addition to supporting technological enhancements, the Haas Annual Fund boosts career services by strategically placing account managers in key regions such as New York. Graduate students also benefit when they participate in academic research and receive student aid.

4. Faculty Support & Retention

In recent years, many distinguished educators have signed on to become ladder-track faculty at the Haas School -- bringing their expertise in finance, real estate, and marketing to our students.

The hard-won freedoms of recent years to pay our faculty market salaries help us remain competitive with other top-10 business schools.

5. Dean's Initiatives

This year, Haas Career Services began providing drop-in career advising at the Undergraduate Program Office to promote accessibility and visibility for our undergraduate students. The Haas Annual Fund also enabled us to introduce a very popular Etiquette Dinner, which prepares undergraduates for business meetings involving meals.

Because of alumni gifts to the Haas Annual Fund, the Career Center has also introduced mock interview tools, to allow for virtual interview coaching for graduate students. They’ve also launched the “Experienced Hire” Resume Database, which has attracted over 500 Haas MBA and EWMBAs alumni who are interested in progressing in their careers.

Your Gifts in Action:

"Haas@Work" is one of the new experiential learning programs offered through the Leading Through Innovation initiative. In these programs, sixty students are invited to a company to analyze a set of business challenges. A subset of the sixty students is then selected to pursue one or two of the challenges to a proposed solution, over the course of semester. There is tremendous demand for this program; annual fund contributions have enabled us to expand the number of students who can take part.

Annual funds are used to supplement individual student contributions to "Haas for Students," which helps students across many non-profit summer employment opportunities. Students in more traditional summer employment contribute to their fellow-students whose summer income is much less; the annual fund adds to what the students have raised from among themselves.