About four years ago, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a crowdfunding campaign and gave the institution $86,000. The university's reaction? Anxiety. "Everyone wanted to know where the money came from. He was a good kid doing a good thing. But from the university's perspective, it set off alarm bells," particularly with how the gift could be distributed within Berkeley's guidelines, says Richard Swart, who became the institution's crowdfunding scholar-in-residence in 2015.

For any college or university, receiving $200 million is a dream come true. So when the University of California, Los Angeles, received that amount from casino mogul Kirk Kerkorian in 2011, officials named the new entity in charge of those assets—you guessed it—the Dream Fund.