Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Alumni and friends of Mississippi State employed by ExxonMobil continue to support the university in a big way.
The Irving, Texas-based corporation recently donated $167,937, which represents matching funds for contributions during 2008 made by its MSU-educated employees and retirees or their surviving spouses.
The funds are among some $36 million being provided to 900 colleges and universities across the United States through the ExxonMobil Foundation's 2008 Educational Matching Gift Program.
"These donations are a remarkable testament to the value ExxonMobil employees and retirees place on higher education," said Kenneth P. Cohen, vice president for public affairs and chairman of the ExxonMobil Foundation. "We're investing in the future, campus by campus, by providing these much needed dollars for colleges and universities to increase their level of excellence."
MSU's Bagley College of Engineering has a long history of producing employees for the international oil and gas company.
"The matching that ExxonMobil provides to employees for financial gifts made to universities is tremendous," said Bagley Dean Sarah Rajala.
"This has motivated young MSU alumni to create endowed scholarships and groups of alumni to pool their contributions to establish an endowed professorship, thus creating a permanent source of funding for recruiting the very best students and faculty to the Bagley College of Engineering and MSU," Rajala added.
ExxonMobil is among more than 16,000 national corporate employers that provide matching higher education gifts for employees' contributions.
The company's educational matching gift program is considered among the most generous of its kind. As much as $7,500 a year per donor is provided on a three-to-one basis to education institutions with which employees or retirees are affiliated.
Mississippi State has received more than $1.7 million through the ExxonMobil program since it began in 1962. In 2008, together with its employees and retirees, the company and its divisions, affiliates and foundation provided $225 million in contributions worldwide, of which more than $89 million was dedicated to education.
The ExxonMobil Foundation is the primary U.S. philanthropic arm of the ExxonMobil Corp. It supports initiatives to improve mathematics and science education at the K-12 and higher education levels.
For more information about MSU's matching gift programs, contact Lynn Shurden of the MSU Foundation at 662-325-8918 or lshurden@advservices.msstate.edu.
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Additional information on ExxonMobil's community partnerships and contributions programs is available at www.exxonmobil.com/community.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.