How much did Open Society Foundations grant to U.S. universities by year, 2010–2024?
Executive summary
A precise, independently verifiable year-by-year table of Open Society Foundations (OSF) grant dollars to U.S. universities for 2010–2024 cannot be produced from the sources provided because OSF does not publish a single, consolidated public report that lists annual totals to U.S. higher‑education institutions for that date range; rather, OSF offers a searchable grants database and fragmented program-level disclosure that require aggregation to derive year-by-year totals [1] [2]. The publicly available material does include some snapshot figures and institutional studies that hint at scale — for example, a study reports university-focused funding rising from $32 million in 2014 to $62 million in 2018, with U.S. universities receiving the largest share in that sample period (72%) — but that is insufficient to reconstruct 2010–2024 annual totals without primary data aggregation [3].
1. What the user is actually asking and why available sources fall short
The user requests annual grant totals from OSF to U.S. universities for 2010–2024, a question that requires either an OSF-published annual breakdown or a complete export of OSF’s grants database followed by year-by-year summation; OSF’s public website provides an awarded-grants database and program/expenditure summaries but does not publish a ready-made table of “U.S. universities — year X — $Y” across 2010–2024, so the necessary arithmetic and classification work is not already in the public reporting supplied here [1] [4] [2].
2. What the sources do provide that is useful
OSF’s official site hosts a searchable grants database and explains its grantmaking approach and regional programs, which is the primary source for any bottom‑up tally of grants to specific institutions and years [1] [2]. OSF’s site also publishes program and regional expenditure snapshots (for example, 2024 regional expenditures by program areas are shown on the public site) that can contextualize overall spending trends but do not isolate U.S. university recipients by year without further analysis [4] [5].
3. Partial figures and independent studies — what can be cited now
Independent compilation by UniversityPhilanthropy indicates that Foundation-to-Promote-Open-Society university funding increased from about $32 million in 2014 to about $62 million in 2018, and in that study U.S. universities comprised roughly 72% of university-directed funding over the sampled five‑year span, signaling substantial U.S. higher‑education support though not providing annualized OSF totals for each year 2010–2024 [3]. This study is the only source among those provided that gives multi-year university-specific amounts, but it covers a subset of years and relies on the researcher’s classification of grants rather than an OSF year-by-year official disclosure [3].
4. How to obtain accurate year-by-year totals (methodology for a follow-up audit)
A verifiable year-by-year accounting requires exporting all grant records from OSF’s awarded-grants database and program pages, filtering grants to recipients classified as U.S. universities, and summing award amounts by calendar year; OSF’s site provides the raw grant records but the aggregation, classification of “university” versus “college” or research center, and normalization for multi-year grants must be performed by the analyst [1] [2]. Absent such a custom aggregation, any table purporting to be complete would be an estimate; the most defensible path is a documented database query or FOIA-like request to OSF for a machine-readable list of grants to U.S. higher‑education institutions 2010–2024 [1].
5. Caveats, competing narratives, and transparency implications
OSF frames its grantmaking as mission-driven and regionally distributed, and critics sometimes seek headline figures tying funding to political influence; given OSF’s global scope and the complex web of national/regional foundations, transparency hinges on method disclosure — aggregate figures can be misleading without definitions (what counts as a “university” grant, how multi-year grants are allocated by year, and whether scholarships/fellowships are included) — and the sources here show those definitional and disclosure gaps rather than hidden numerical malfeasance [2] [6] [3].