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 broke its own record for the 6th straight year, raising $3,072,184 from over 4,300 donors.

2008-09 Goals

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 Competitionsand, most recently, dedicated career services for undergraduates. Through this fund, you provide an immediate and direct impact on our students.

3. Graduate Programs

In addition to supporting technological enhancements, this fund also 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

Seven distinguished educators have signed on to become ladder-track faculty at the Haas School during the 2008-2009 academic year, bringing expertise in finance, real estate, and marketing.

The hard-won freedoms of recent years to pay our faculty market salaries help us remain competitive with other top-10 business schools. Last year, we hired three faculty into slots that were wholly Haas-financed.  We are now able to invest aggressively in our deepest asset:  full-time faculty.

5. Dean's Initiatives

Haas Career Services has begun providing drop-in career advising at the UG Program Office to promote accessibility and visibility and introduced a very popular Business/Dinning Etiquette workshop just for undergraduates.  This past summer (2008), the Dean was able to sponsor the first-ever Career Conference for juniors and seniors with generous support from Mark DiPaola, Class of 1999.  The Dean is also underwriting an MBA Special Initiative Fund which will help fund student-led initiatives and special projects.

The Career Center also launched web-based mock interview tools to allow for virtual interview coaching for graduate students and the “Experienced Hire” Resume Database that attracted over 500 Haas MBA and EWMBAs alumni 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.