Haas Annual Fund: Supporting Haas Today

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.

1. Unrestricted

Alumni services, Haas@Cal, learning workshops, and career networking events for students and alumni are all supported by the Haas Annual Fund. These investments provide immediate resources for advancing new ideas and strategic priorities.

2. Undergraduate Programs

A large portion of the Haas Annual Fund supports undergraduate teaching, as well as the internal and external Case Competitions. Through this fund, donors are having an immediate and direct impact on our students.

3. Graduate Programs

This year, investments for graduate programs were directed to initiatives which would provide broad impact, including technological enhancements, student aid for academic research as well as funding for Career Services to strategically place account managers in key regions such as New York.

4. Faculty Support & Retention

In 2005, five remarkable new faculty members chose Haas over several other top ranked schools. With new freedoms to pay our faculty market salaries, we can remain competitive with other top-10 business schools. For the first time, we hired three faculty into slots that were wholly Haas-financed. Thanks to donor investments, we can now invest aggressively in our deepest asset: full-time faculty.

5. Dean's Initiatives

Gifts to the Dean’s Discretionary Fund enabled the school to conduct its first-ever external review of our Career Services. A Career Services position has also been created to further strengthen Haas support of its student and alumni population. This year, we hired a full-time Employer Relations Specialist at the campus Career Center for Haas undergraduate students. Theogene Rudasingwa, former Ambassador of Rwanda to the United States, participated in this year’s successful Bridging the Divide program thanks to funding by the Dean’s Discretionary Fund.

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.