Old Band Guy Speaks (Warning - A Very Long Post)

[SMUPhil]

For what it's worth, I remember a few years ago that the band and Diamond M Club were told they were not allowed to specifically solicit donors (Cox (who's a band alum), Dedman, Sewell, etc) and could only have an open drive to raise money.

[The Spaz]

Why does the band not hit up all of the band alumni for the past 50 years and try to raise money? 50 years x 40 members per year x 50 dollars(average)= $100000. The school may try and come up with something if you come to the table with $100k. If you expect them to foot the whole bill then you are living in dreamworld.

Fuzzy Math
You're assuming that we have 40 members every ONE year and then a new 40 members the next year. Let's say each freshmen class brings in 10 while the senior class loses 10. The first year of your 50, we get 40x$50 bucks ($2000).
After that, it's 49 years of 500 bucks (24,500)
So we've got a sum total of 26,500, just by your math alone
Granted, we've had years with freshmen classes exceeding 10, but we've also had one's with less than 10
Some people can't afford enough to send, some have allready donated a lot this year that went into scholarships etc, and some left after freshman year or didn't really like the band that much or whatever.