Paying for College: Is a Crowdfunding Campaign Worth the Time and Effort?

In an era when student loans are frequently viewed as undesirable, students are increasingly turning to less conventional methods to finance their college degrees. One such approach that might be gaining traction could be crowdfunding.

In short, crowdfunding is a method of raising money by soliciting small donations from large numbers of people via the internet. When applied to higher education, crowdfunding involves creating a campaign to fund certain aspects of one’s college journey, such as tuition, textbooks, or room and board.

A recent surge in the number of students attempting to pay for college through this method attracted national media coverage from the Dow Jones financial news platform MarketWatch in March 2023. A feature article reported that new data from the fundraising platform GoFundMe indicated that college students were increasingly trying to cover their educational expenses through crowdfunding.

According to the report by MarketWatch’s personal finance editor Leslie Albrecht, who quoted a spokesperson for GoFundMe, the platform’s fundraisers for college tuition surged by more than 50 percent compared with the previous year.

Moreover, overall postsecondary fundraising by students at college and trade schools also surged by 30 percent over 2022 levels on the platform as well. The report cited examples of campaigns by Sacramento nursing students, Santa Fe art students, and Virginia culinary students, all of whom sought to pay for college expenses between $3,100 and $4,600.

The story also interviewed Dr. Robert Kelchen, an educational leadership professor at the University of Tennessee, who said that the surge in GoFundMe tuition campaigns provides another indication that concern about college affordability is now “front and center” in Americans’ consciousness. MarketWatch also quoted Karen McCarthy, a vice president with the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), who said that some colleges had even started setting up emergency funds for their students as crowdfunding alternatives.

Now, what is GoFundMe? Based in Redwood City, California, this 16-year-old Silicon Valley company enables users to launch funding drives that collect online donations. It claims to be the world’s largest fundraising platform, with a corporate mission to help people, causes, and charities raise money rapidly and efficiently.

According to the Associated Press, the firm’s platform enables users to tap into their personal connections along with the generosity of unknown benefactors and combine those resources from both networks to help meet large costs through collective gifts. Originally launched in 2009 to help users pay medical bills, these days, users frequently raise money for hospital operations and other unexpected health challenges, as well as basic living expenses. The company collects a 2.9 percent fee and a 30-cent charge from every donation.

All these gifts have scaled up into a big business. During 2022, around 28 million Americans donated $25 billion through the platform, and in 2023 this “emerging unicorn” earned about $23 million alongside a $17 billion valuation.

Then, in January 2025, the San Francisco data analysis firm 6sense ranked GoFundMe first in market share within the crowdfunding industry. GoFundMe reportedly controls nearly half (44 percent) of this market, surpassing its top two competitors, Brooklyn-based Kickstarter with 33 percent, and the creator funding platform Patreon with 6.6 percent.

GoFundMe also faces competition from an assortment of specialized platforms. Examples include ten other crowdfunding sites for college and education costs that appear in this list compiled by New York author and crowdfunding expert Salvador Briggman, which, at the time of this writing, was last updated in February 2024.

Applying a large-scale online platform to fundraising isn’t new; the technique was first launched decades ago to fund entrepreneurial ventures like startup companies. And as early as 2000, the first online charity, known as JustGiving, had appeared on the internet.

GoFundMe’s history demonstrates early support of newsworthy college student fundraising campaigns that won coverage from the national media. For example, one of GoFundMe’s most famous campaigns funded college costs back in 2014 for Griffin Furlong.

At the time, Furlong had just won a seat in Florida State University’s undergraduate civil engineering program after graduating as valedictorian of his Jacksonville high school class with perfect grades. But on graduation day, Furlong had ended up homeless. NBC Nightly News reported that his GoFundMe campaign had yielded more than $69,000 to help Furlong pay for college expenses.

That year, GoFundMe raised over $13 million from 107,000 education-related campaigns. Then, in 2019, GoFundMe reported that specific crowdfunding campaigns to pay for college tuition were already raising roughly $1.5 million per month, with the average proceeds for each campaign amounting to about $2,000.

By 2023, the firm had reported even more growth in its higher education business. The platform said its number of education fundraisers had remained relatively stable at 100,000, but now they were raising over $70 million annually—a 288 percent increase over five years.

By that time, the company had also launched a support website for education fundraisers. Currently, that site recommends users write a profile where they share their “hopes and aspirations” with benefactors, and also encourages college students to promote their campaign to their alumni network.

Despite the continued growth of GoFundMe’s education business, some experts have expressed doubts that crowdfunding provides worthwhile solutions for most college students.

Dr. Lande Ajose, the managing director of the Waverly Street Foundation and a recent chair of the California Student Aid Commission, told the Christian Science Monitor that crowdfunding wasn’t likely to help low and middle-income students who need the most financial help. An MIT PhD, Dr. Ajose, said that’s because individuals in those students’ social circles don’t have a lot of money they can donate.

“A student who is needy would need to have some sort of champion with disposable income,” Ajose said.

Seattle student Rae Monica Edie didn’t have those sorts of champions, which is probably why her campaign only raised less than $500. “The people who achieve their goals off GoFundMe either have a large group of people around them who are more than willing to contribute large amounts, or are able to get better publicity and therefore their story is better known, resulting in more donations,” she told the CSM.

Although our research for this report didn’t uncover any examples of a student who paid for an entire degree program through crowdfunding, that doesn’t mean that these techniques can’t be worthwhile in certain cases. It’s likely that certain talented students with access to the right combination of resources could achieve success by encouraging donations for specific, limited segments of their college budgets through crowdfunding campaigns, like tuition, housing costs, or textbooks. In fact, we came across four examples of students who’ve done this already.

Alexis-Brianna Felix, Boston University

Despite receiving financial aid, Boston University student Alexis-Brianna Felix feared she might need to stop out of college because she was running out of cash. She had exhausted her scholarship options and family’s support, then was denied private loans because she lacked credit and a cosigner.

Felix finally turned to crowdfunding using GoFundMe, and set an initial goal of $5,000 to cover her spring semester tuition. She swiftly reached that target within only the first 27 hours after posting her campaign page on the platform.

Following media coverage like this Boston Globe story, donations increased, ultimately totaling $9,761. From the Globe story:

Many donations came from friends Felix made at the Horace Mann School, a prestigious private college preparatory school in the affluent Riverdale section of the Bronx she was able to attend due to good grades and generous financial aid. Others came from alumni of the high school and BU, and from strangers.

One $5 donation carried this message: “We don’t know each other, but I was touched by your courage, tenacity, and perseverance.”

Abigail Covington, Syracuse University

Washington, DC high school graduate Abigail Covington was accepted into Syracuse University but faced a $5,000 shortfall after receiving her financial aid offer. Covington faced the prospect of taking out more loans because her family’s breadwinner—her mother—had been on sick leave for seven months due to a cancer diagnosis.

Covington instead opted to launch a GoFundMe campaign to bridge the financial gap. Incredibly, she reached her $5,000 goal within only a single day, and eventually raised over $7,000 to pay for textbooks and a winter coat along with her tuition. From the CSM article:

Covington, meanwhile, had a little help in expanding her funding circle. Many of her donations came from alumni of her boarding school, the private Madeira School in McLean, Va., after one her former deans saw the campaign and put it out to contacts in her professional networks. She also had friends and fellow classmates share her campaign across social media.

Luna Mateo, University of California

The University of California at Berkeley had offered Luna Mateo an opportunity to pursue a doctoral degree in medical anthropology. The only problem was that as a first-generation student and an immigrant to the United States, Mateo didn’t live in California—and at the time in 2023, didn’t have the cash to move to Berkeley and rent a new apartment.

So Mateo set up a profile on the GoFundMe platform, and then reached out for support to her family and community. Mateo’s fundraiser was so successful that in only about a month, it had exceeded its goal of $5,000. What’s more, 34 donors pitched in without delay, with only four donors funding 50 percent of Mateo’s goal request. This is an example of how prior online experience with platforms like GoFundMe isn’t necessary for a smart, hardworking first-time fundraiser to win a remarkable outcome.

Sarel van Baalen, Oxford University

Even after a master’s degree in civil engineering and five years of management experience with a construction firm in Johannesburg, Sarel van Baalen still couldn’t save enough money to pay the pricey $70,000 tuition charged by the MBA program at Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

Saïd had awarded him an $18,000 scholarship. But with only $8,800 in savings, van Baalen still needed $43,000.

In 2018, Bloomberg reported that about two-fifths of MBA applicants were typically willing to borrow $100,000 to pay for a top-25 program like Oxford’s. A loan at first seemed workable to him—until van Baalen concluded that he could never afford the interest.

After reaching out for advice through LinkedIn to strategists who had orchestrated a series of successful crowdfunding campaigns, van Baalen launched his own. After his campaign had raised $16,000, he enrolled at Oxford in September 2019.

How did he do it? He wrote a compelling social investment pitch. In his story, he argued that he needed an MBA to win foreign investments that would fund critical upgrades for water, energy and transportation infrastructure projects across Africa. So long as he agreed to deliver certain “returns” on their investments within three years, that pitch resonated with benefactors concerned about Africa’s future who offered to underwrite van Baalen’s degree.

Research projects have so far focused on crowdfunding to raise money for startup businesses and for academic research projects conducted by colleges and universities, not on the effectiveness of crowdfunding campaigns to finance individual college students’ educational expenses. Moreover, it’s difficult to draw conclusions about crowdfunding’s cost/benefit ratio for college students based only on the roughly 100 published articles reviewed for this report.

However, good clues exist.

The role of pre-existing personal connections within an affluent network can’t be underestimated. This was the observation reported by Dr. Ajose, and it has profound implications for the potential success of student crowdfunding campaigns.

It’s probably not a coincidence that two of the successful crowdfunders our research uncovered—Covington and Felix—both had recently graduated from expensive prep schools. That advantage gave them ready access to rapidly-responsive networks of affluent former classmates and their families with disposable income. And although we know much less about her background, Mateo could also have been associated with a similar sort of affluent network, given that only four benefactors funded half of her $5,000 goal.

Although we don’t know if van Baalen had graduated from a prep school, he had already earned two college degrees and worked for an engineering firm for five years before applying to Oxford, which meant he was probably a member of one or more affluent networks for at least the previous 11 years. His article suggests that he was also a capable networker on LinkedIn immediately before launching his campaign.

By contrast, Edie doesn’t appear to have been a member of this kind of network, which might at least partially explain why her campaign fell short of her expectations.

It’s certainly true that the successful crowdfunders in our report had access to alumni networks of the universities they were currently attending or had graduated from and that these would also qualify as affluent networks. Alumni from these networks had reportedly donated in at least two of the campaigns, and Felix additionally received additional exposure before Boston University’s alumni because of her Globe story and her other media coverage. However, because the crowdfunders probably had no previous relationships with these alumni donors, they may have needed to invest time and effort in building some of these relationships before any contributions.

Notice also that all of the successful crowdfunders benefitted from compelling stories. With Felix, Covington, and Mateo, these were inspiring stories related to overcoming obstacles, including Covington’s particularly touching account of her sick mother’s battle with cancer. With van Baalen, his story focused more on the critical need to finally deliver modern water treatment, electrification and transportation projects across the regions of Africa that need that support the most—and the tremendous potential benefits to the populations in those areas.

To sum up, many students may not have opportunities to benefit from certain hallmark characteristics that may make crowdfunding campaigns successful, such as membership in an affluent network or a compelling story. That’s why a crowdfunding campaign might not be the best investment in time and effort for these students.

However, there’s still a significant proportion of America’s 11 million college and graduate students for whom a crowdfunding campaign would amount to a worthwhile endeavor. If a student has opportunities to benefit from one or more of the attributes associated with successful campaigns, then on balance, the time and effort invested in a crowdfunding effort would probably make good sense.