This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott is on another donation spree, giving more than $740 million total to over a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, as well as at least one tribal college since mid-October.
In 2019 — the same year Scott and her ex-husband, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, divorced — she pledged to give away most of her wealth. Scott’s fortune is estimated to be worth $38.7 billion, according to Bloomberg.
On Thursday, Little Priest Tribal College, in Nebraska, said it received a $5 million donation from the billionaire philanthropist. The institution — the first tribal college to publicly announce a gift from Scott during her latest donation blitz — said it would use the gift to accelerate plans to develop a new 10-acre campus.
So far, Howard University, in Washington, D.C., has garnered the largest among Scott’s recent gifts to colleges. Earlier this month, the philanthropist donated the research university $80 million, earmarking $17 million of that amount for its medical college.
Most of the colleges have received gifts from Scott before.
Scott has made mass donations to higher education institutions in previous years — by 2021, she had given at least $1.5 billion total to roughly six dozen institutions. Her other rounds of donations have likewise focused on minority-serving institutions, such as Hispanic-serving institutions and HBCUs.
Below, we’re rounding up colleges that have received gifts from Scott in her latest donation spree. Let us know if we’ve missed any announcements.
Scott has given over $700M to colleges in latest donation spree
The gifts higher education institutions have received from Scott in recent months
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
Eight historically Black colleges and universities have received a total of $387 million in unrestricted donations from billionaire philanthropistMacKenzie Scottsince mid-October.
On Sunday, Howard University, in Washington, D.C., revealed it had received an $80 million gift from Scott, with $17 million earmarked for its medical school. The following day, Spelman College, a women’s HBCU in Georgia, said Scott had donated $38 million.
Both colleges, along with most of the six other HBCUs, previously received multimillion dollar donations from Scott during her first round of higher education giving in 2020. Each described their gift as one of the biggest — if not the largest — in their history.
Dive Insight:
In 2019, the same year Scott divorced Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, she signed the Giving Pledge, a pact directed at the world’s wealthiest people to donate more than half their wealth.
“I have a disproportionate amount of money to share,” Scott, one of the richest women in the world, wrote in her pledge statement at the time. “And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”
She still has quite a ways to go. As of this week, Bloomberg estimated Scott’s net worth at $42 billion — up from $39.4 billion last November.
Scott is now in the midst of another significant round of donations, and the notably private donor acknowledged the attention it would attract in a rare online statement last month.
“When my next cycle of gifts is posted to my database online, the dollar total will likely be reported in the news,” she said in an Oct. 15 blog post. But she characterized that amount as “a vanishingly tiny fraction” of the hundreds of billions of dollars in annual charitable giving in the U.S. each year “that we don’t read about online or hear about on the nightly news.”
Her most recent spate of HBCU donations include:
Scott also donated $70 million in September to UNCF, the largest private scholarship provider for minority students in the U.S. The organization, which counts 37 private HBCUs as members, said the money would go to bolstering the long-term financial health of those colleges.
In 2020, Scott donated over $800 million to colleges, focusing much of the funding on HBCUs. In addition to their high-dollar value, her gifts stood out because they were unrestricted, and she did not appear to have a personal relationship with the recipients.
The Council for Advancement and Support of Education found that unrestricted contributions to surveyed colleges increased by nearly a third in fiscal 2021 compared to the year before, attributing much of that growth to Scott.
By early 2023, she had donated at least $1.5 billion to roughly six dozen colleges, with an emphasis on minority-serving institutions like HBCUs.
Foundations disproportionately give less to HBCUs compared to similar non-HBCUs, and public HBCUs have historically been underfunded by the government.
From 2015 to 2019, foundations donated a combined $5.5 billion to the eight Ivy League institutions, compared to $303 million for 99 HBCUs, according to a 2023 study. That worked out to the average Ivy League institution receiving 178 times more foundation funding than the average HBCU.
And a 2023 analysis from the Biden administration found that land-grant HBCUs in 16 states missed out on over $12 billion from 1987 to 2020 due to state underfunding.
Five years out from Scott’s first donations, research suggests those funds may help boost enrollment and retention.
A 2021 analysis of the 23 HBCUs that received a total of $560 million from Scott in 2020 found that their median new student enrollment was more than 300 students higher than HBCU counterparts that did not receive funding. Their retention rates were an average of 15% higher as well.
Colleges have reported using the money in a variety of ways.
Spelman, for example, received $20 million from Scott in 2020. Of that, $11 million went to the college’s endowment, and $1.1 million went to its Social Justice Scholars program, a spokesperson told The Atlantic Journal-Constitution. In addition, every student that year received a $3,500 scholarship. The remainder of the gift went to technology upgrades, academic programming and other improvements, the spokesperson said.
Beyond adding to a college’s coffers directly, a large dollar donation can help raise an institution’s profile.
Clark Atlanta saw a “catalytic impact” to its fundraising efforts thanks to Scott’s $15 million donation in 2020, college President George French Jr. told AJC before the latest round of donations became public.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has gifted Morgan State University $63 million in unrestricted funds, the largest gift in the university’s history.
In 2020, Scott awarded the historically Black university in Baltimore $40 million, which went toward multiple research centers and endowed faculty positions, among other advancements.
Morgan State leaders announced that the new funding will help build the university’s endowment, expand student supports and advance its research.
David K. Wilson, president of Morgan State, called the gift “a resounding testament to the work we’ve done to drive transformation, not only within our campus but throughout the communities we serve.”
“To receive one historic gift from Ms. Scott was an incredible honor; to receive two speaks volumes about the confidence she and her team have in our institution’s stewardship, leadership, and trajectory,” Wilson said in the announcement. “This is more than philanthropy—it’s a partnership in progress.”
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott donated $70 million to the United Negro College Fund last week. The funds will be distributed to private historically Black colleges and universities that are UNCF members.
The $70 million will be spread across 37 member institutions.
Scott’s donation contributes to UNCF’s goal of raising $370 million (as part of a larger $1 billion capital campaign) for a pooled endowment to be split across its membership. UNCF plans to distribute $5 million to each member and work with universities to raise matching funds, in the hopes of “creating a $10 million stake per institution,” with annual distributions of 4 percent.
“This extraordinary gift is a powerful vote of confidence in HBCUs and in the work of UNCF,” said Michael L. Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF, in a news release announcing the donation last week. “It provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity for our member institutions to build permanent assets that will support students and campuses for decades to come.”
Scott’s donation follows a $10 million gift to UNCF in 2020. Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, also donated heavily to HBCUs and tribal colleges in 2020, giving away tens of millions of dollars to individual institutions, many of which have historically been underfunded.
