The year was 1959. Marvin Phaup Jr. ’62 was spending his summer at a textile plant in Roanoke, cleaning equipment “alongside two other hard-luck students,” he recalled.
One year before, he had graduated from a small high school in Mecklenburg County and headed to the University of Virginia. It hadn’t gone well.
“I was flat on my back academically,” Phaup remembered.
His father suggested he look into transferring to the liberal arts school just down the road. Turns out, Roanoke College was exactly what he needed.
“Roanoke took me as I was and put me back together again and gave me a basic foundation,” Phaup said. He graduated second in his class and returned to UVA for a master’s degree in economics. In the ensuing years, he would win a Fulbright scholarship to Norway, earn his Ph.D. and move to Washington, D.C., to work for the Congressional Budget Office as a budget analyst. He said none of that would have happened without his years at Roanoke College.
“I just didn’t have the basic skills, and Roanoke gave me those—patiently,” Phaup said. “I really feel like they rescued my academic and professional life.”
Phaup’s story is not uncommon among Maroons. Roanoke College students and alumni speak of their close relationships with their professors, deep friendships with peers, student research they were able to complete as undergraduates, and life-changing trips they took in summers, semesters abroad or May Terms. Many alumni were recipients of scholarships or financial aid.
At a time of rising costs, shifting enrollment patterns and diminishing support from federal funding, Roanoke College has a greater need than ever for its alumni, community and supporters to give back—especially to the school’s endowment. This year, the college has narrowed its fundraising focus to student financial aid and unrestricted endowment giving with an aim to triple the endowment over the next five years. This investment helps ensure that all Roanoke students can meet the rising costs of college. It also ensures access to opportunities that enhance their campus experience and gives them skills to thrive in today’s increasingly complex and competitive world.
“I think this process puts good into motion,” Roanoke College President Frank Shushok Jr. said of endowment giving. “It’s like you are part of everyone. And everyone, collectively, is literally changing the future for generations of students.”
Phaup began making donations to the college as soon as he could swing it financially, in the mid-1970s, when he was in his 30s. “I felt like I owed them a lot. I still do,” he said.
When it came time to draft a will, Phaup named Roanoke College as one of his beneficiaries. Bequests are a vital source of donations for the college, bringing in more than $27 million for the endowment over the last 15 fiscal years. Still, among living alumni aged 65 and older, only 8% have a documented planned gift with the college. All alumni are encouraged to consider including their alma mater in their estate planning.
“It seemed like one of the places where my money would do the most good,” Phaup said.
What is an endowment, anyway?
In personal finance terms, an endowment is akin to a 401(k) – an investment in the future, a pool of money with a set of restrictions, a carefully managed fund with a variety of income streams. It’s not a checking or savings account, where readily available monies pay for everyday budgeted expenses. It’s a collection of donations invested to return long-term dividends that are spent on scholarships, projects, programs and other needs.
Just like at the personal level, the larger the investment, the bigger the payouts. So, a university with a $750 million endowment (such as St. Olaf College in Minnesota) receives a heartier annual payment than a university with a $400 million endowment (Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania) or a school like Roanoke with a more modest endowment ($170 million).
A college’s endowment is, in fact, made up of many smaller endowments—endowed professorships, endowed scholarships, endowments supporting athletic programs or research projects. The monies are combined and invested in stocks, bonds, real estate, hedge funds and more. Each university determines how much of its assets can be spent per year (typically 4-5% of investment returns). Depending on the particulars of each endowment, the funds that are drawn down support teaching salaries, student financial aid and other student opportunities. If donations are made to an unrestricted endowment fund, they can be spent on hard-to-pay-for maintenance (such as replacing a boiler or a roof) or provide seed money for a larger initiative. Nationwide, two-thirds of endowment spending is allocated to student financial aid and academics, according to a 2025 National Association of College and University Business Officers report.
“There are so many analogies to investing in a 401(k),” said Shushok. He emphasizes that endowment giving is even more powerful and long-lasting than retirement investing. Financial planners often advise that a 22-year-old who puts $100 a month into a retirement account can expect to have $1 million by the time they retire.
“But when people invest in an endowment, they are investing in a long line of students, through the lifetime of an institution,” says Shushok. “The gifts people made 50 or 60 years ago are today influencing the lives of young people and their futures. That’s an exponential legacy.”
Vice President for Advancement Nate Stewart, himself a Roanoke College graduate from Southwest Virginia, said, “What I like to tell alums is: ‘I can’t pay back the person who gave the scholarship for me to go to Roanoke College, but I can pay it forward for the next generation of students to come to Roanoke College.’”
At Roanoke College, invested endowment funds start with a contribution of $50,000 before the fund can be endowed. All endowment donations are managed by an outside financial firm. New endowment donations are invested for four quarters before returns are spent, giving the money a chance to grow. After that, the interest from the investment can be applied to whatever use was identified by the donor through a signed fund agreement.
At Roanoke, named endowments support faculty chair positions, centers and institutes, fellowships, need or merit-based scholarships, and the Campus Preservation Fund, among other designations. Only 8% of Roanoke’s endowment is unrestricted, explains Stewart. This is an area the school is hoping to grow.
“I just didn’t have the basic skills, and Roanoke gave me those—patiently. I really feel like they rescued my academic and professional life.”
Dr. Marvin Phaup Jr. '62
‘Providing opportunity’
About a mile from the brick-lined walkways and manicured lawns of the college’s main campus stretches a tumble of grasses and wildflowers, dense tree canopy and tangled undergrowth. There’s an information sign; a scattering of bee, bat and bird boxes; and a few numbered red blocks that hint at a self-guided tour.
This is Roanoke College’s Environment Center, located on the Elizabeth Campus. Despite its unassuming vibes, it’s a unique space: at once an outdoor classroom, a hands-on environmental lab, a research site, a connector to the community, a restoration effort and an opportunity for students to gain valuable, real-world experiences.
“It’s really rewarding,” said Hayden Hanke ’26 of the time he has spent at the Environment Center. As a senior environmental studies major and biology minor who hopes to one day create nature documentaries, Hanke has spent much of his last year-and-a-half at the center. That included two months last summer conducting research on the diversity of plant, insect and bird species; leading educational programming for kids in the community; and creating a photo guide of birds and butterflies likely to be seen on site.
“I’ve been building all types of skills that are really good for the workplace,” he explained, while pointing out native plant species and a data-collecting weather station on the edge of the meadow. “Plus, it gives me purpose, taking care of this land.”
Yet, without a financial gift from Briscoe and Kenan White, opportunities like the one Hayden enjoyed would not exist. Their contribution in 2013 established an endowment that provides ongoing funding for the work that happens here, paying for research supplies, the van that ferries students from main campus and on field trips, and stipends that support students’ summertime labor.
The Environment Center isn’t a building or a professor’s salary. It’s the kind of project that might not be covered by tuition revenue or an annual fund drive. A grant might fund its groundbreaking but likely wouldn’t maintain its work across a dozen years. This hands-on learning project, so central to the students who experience it, is an example of why Roanoke College is hoping to grow its donor giving.
For the Whites, whose son Ben graduated from Roanoke College in 2011 with a degree in environmental policy, and who, themselves, spent time hiking and camping in the Roanoke region when they were students at Virginia Tech and Hollins University, establishing an endowment that funded environmental education aligned with their values and priorities.
“It’s clearly providing opportunity,” said Kenan White of the family’s contributions. Regarding a longer-lasting investment, she said: “It’s all well and good to create something, but you have to support it. For me, an endowment is insurance into the future.”
For the Whites, contributing to the schools their three children attended feels like a tangible way to show gratitude. “If I look at the time spent at those schools and the impact that those schools had on my children, I owe them a lot,” says White. “And so it makes sense to me as a parent whose child had a great experience at that school.”
Serving students today
Today’s college students face even more challenges than previous generations.
The cost of college has risen drastically over the decades, even as the need for a college degree is more important than ever. Large land-grant universities who once served a wide swath of high school graduates from their state have become more prestigious and competitive. Often, it’s smaller schools like Roanoke College that serve students who depend on financial aid and need paid summer internships.
“Small, independent colleges like Roanoke College are doing a lot more of the heavy lifting when it comes to social mobility and giving people a chance to invest in their talents,” Shushok said.
Today, he explains, 40% of Roanoke’s students are underrepresented or underserved, populations that include veterans, rural students, first-generation students and students of color. 
This shift in student demographics has affected Roanoke’s funding model, Shushok said.
Schools attract students both by the experiences they offer and their ability to provide an affordable tuition rate. If Roanoke College sets tuition higher than its peer institutions, students will go elsewhere.
“Without students, we have no mission,” said Vice President of Advancement Stewart.
But if Roanoke College offers a tuition rate it can’t afford, then that financial aid steals from budgeted expenses.
“Last year, we awarded $36 million in financial aid,” Stewart said. “Only $3.6 million was actually funded through the endowment.” That difference equates to an unfunded discount in operating revenue, essentially eroding the level of excellence to which the college aspires.
“If we can continue to grow scholarships for students, that’s going to allow us to attract more students,” Stewart said. “But also, funding student scholarships enables us to meet students where they are, with actual dollars.”
Roanoke College today receives less tuition revenue per student than in the past, Stewart said. That gap must be made up somehow.
“We don’t fund enough of the needs that our students have,” Shushok said. “We are going to close that gap. We want people on the team who are going to help us do that. We need them.”
It’s not only tuition. In its effort to serve today’s students, Roanoke also strives to provide funding for summer internships, travel experiences and learning opportunities like the Environment Center. Because learning doesn’t happen only in the classroom.
“Providing those experiences can set us apart in the recruitment and retention of students,” Stewart said.
“That’s the thing that inspires me every day,” he said. “Seeing our students, seeing their hopes, their purpose, their possibilities, and then trying to make sure we can raise money to meet all of those needs.”
“It’s experiences. Getting them out. Getting them into. Getting them onto. That’s what we want to see."
Kenan White
Shaping a life
When Talia Cartafalsa ’24 talks about her summer work in Maine’s salt marshes, you can hear the excitement in her voice – and the potential for her research to make the world a better place.
“My lab group is interested in the interactions between salty groundwater and fresh groundwater, and how much carbon is being transferred to the coast,” she explained. 
After graduating from Roanoke College as a valedictorian, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in ocean and earth sciences at Old Dominion University. Her summer research was in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “This will make up at least one of the chapters in my dissertation,” she said.
Her success so far, and her future, are the result of the programs, research and opportunities she discovered at Roanoke College as an environmental studies and chemistry double major. In her sophomore year, she was connected with the Environment Center. “I just fell in love with it. I completed research for credit every semester after that,” she explained. “It was such a huge part of my college experience.”
In 2024, she enrolled in a senior practicum class, working with the same professor who had advised her over the previous two years. “That class was very student-driven,” she said. “It was very much up to us to make decisions and make the project happen.”
Cartafalsa built a rain garden at the Environment Center, then presented her project as a prototype to a Roanoke church that was interested in building a rain garden on their property.
“In addition to the subject material, what I learned was how to be a project leader, how to be a team builder, how to work with classmates more as colleagues. These were the most important skills.”
Cartafalsa is exactly the kind of student the White family hoped they might inspire with their endowment giving. “It’s experiences. Getting them out. Getting them into. Getting them onto. That’s what we want to see,” said White.
Shushok concurs: “I just don’t know that there’s anything more powerful than a student knowing that someone else gave what they had to help them have a future that might be different than the one they would have had without it.”
Similar to Roanoke College senior Hayden Hanke’s summer 2025 internship, Cartafalsa spent two summers conducting research at the Environment Center, some of which was supported by the White family endowment.
“I treated the summers as continuations of what I was already doing,” Cartafalsa said, “which was amazing. I feel like we got the most done during the summers.”
Without housing and a stipend, Cartafalsa, from Massapequa, New York, doesn’t know if she could have remained on campus over the summers. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Does it make the most sense to go home and work a job where I'm making money or stay on campus doing the research that I love?’ Not having to make that choice is huge.”
Shushok hopes alumni will think back to the choices they had to make as students. How, in everyone’s college years, there are decisions and paths – taken and not taken – that shape the rest of a student’s life. What if an endowment donation might open a door, shift a journey of someone and their future family? How amazing might that be?
Would it be worth it to set aside some personal savings to pay it forward to the communal future?
“I think it’s so helpful to return to those days and reflect on how literally transformative those years were and how much it has shaped just about everything your life has been about: your friendships, your vocational choices, your values, your sense of moral responsibility,” Shushok said.
“I just believe an investment in that kind of human formation pays all kinds of dividends.”
To learn more about planned giving and other endowment gifts, contact Vice President for Advancement Nate Stewart at 540-375-2230 or nastewart@roanoke.edu.