Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences has recently reached a whopping $100 million in… Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences has recently reached a whopping $100 million in donations.

This number is a vast improvement on the amount of money raised in the past, according to Norman John Cooper, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.

“In this capital campaign, we’ve been raising money at about three-and-a-half times more per year than we were before,” Cooper said.

This fund raiser is part of the larger Building Our Future Together campaign, an ambitious fundraising project with its goal set at $2 billion.

The University reached the $1 billion mark in October 2006, and the total is now at $1.19 billion.

The $100 million will be used to create scholarships and fellowships to attract the most qualified students and to endow chairs to attract the best teachers.

The money may also be put toward new buildings and be used for programmatic support.

The bulk of the contributions came from individual donors – mainly alumni.

“It’s a real statement about the success of Pitt alums and about the commitment of alums to the University and their willingness to give back to make opportunities they had available to the next generation,” Cooper said.

The gift that put the total at $100 million came from longtime donors Ralph Yingst, who received his PhD in Chemistry from Pitt, and his wife Helen.

Their donation created the Ralph E. and Helen Yingst Scholarship Fund in the department of chemistry.

Cooper said that a strong endowment is one of the things that the top universities in the country all have in common.

“The University as a whole is very committed to the idea that support from our friends and alums can really take the University to a different level,” he said.

When the Building Our Future Campaign began in 1997, $1 billion seemed like an ambitious goal, as the University had never raised anywhere near this amount of money before.

Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg urged the project along, believing that a large capital campaign was essential for the future of the University.

Pitt’s Board of Trustees became so impressed by the support from donators that it felt it could safely raise the goal to $2 billion.

The largest gift from a single donor, $3 million, came from Bettye and Ralph Bailey after whom Cooper’s position is now named.

Bettye Bailey graduated from the School of General Studies in 1984.

Her husband is the chairman of the Connecticut-based pollution control firm Fuel Tech Inc.