Stop donating to Harvard and the Ivy League. There’s a better option that MacKenzie Scott already figured out
Last year, billionaire philanthropist Mac Kenzie Scott embarked on a giving spree, giving $740 million to 16 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. It’s a meaningful boost for institutions that have long operated with far too little, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader shift in philanthropic habits. Gifts of this scale to under-resourced colleges remain rare, while elite universities continue to draw far larger sums year after year. At this point, Harvard and Yale don’t need your money. Yet they continue to attract it. The eight Ivy League universities collectively hold more than $200 billion in endowment wealth. That single number eclipses the resources of entire sectors that educate exponentially more students. All 100-plus HBCUs together manage just $4 billion to $5 billion. America’s roughly 1,000 community colleges hold only about $655 million in endowment assets. Some 400 regional public universities share between $30 billion and $50 billion. The combined amount still pales in comparison to Ivy League largesse. And yet, at a time when Americans are demanding more value, the strongest returns come precisely from those institutions. Scott appears to understand what many donors have yet to fully appreciate: the smartest place to put your money isn’t always the universities with billion-dollar endowments, gleaming campuses, and armies of fundraisers, but the colleges that have been scraping by for generations, quietly doing more with less. Indeed, HBCUs have long advanced economic mobility for communities too often left out of the mainstream. Community colleges and regional universities open doors to millions each year, offering affordable pathways to careers and degrees that change family trajectories for generations. And they do it all on comparatively lean budgets. Imagine what these institutions could do if more donors stopped reflexively writing checks to their alma mater and instead invested in institutions making t