People in the DC Metro area are making good salaries, pretty much across the board, but houses cost between 300K and a million bucks. Everything is expensive. Very few people with families have a couple of thousand extra bucks lying around. It's all earmarked for something.

That said, the issue makes sense. If Virginia Tech wants to complete at the level of Florida State and Clemson, it has to have alumni giving that matches their giving. Given that there are 230,000 VT alumni, it should not be difficult to expand the giving base from 10,000 to 20 or 30 thousand.