Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has been on a roll. In just the past few weeks, she’s made several multimillion-dollar donations to DEI and disaster relief causes.
And on Sunday, Howard University announced that Scott, who is worth an estimated $35.6 billion, had donated $80 million to the historically Black school.
As is Scott’s style, the gift is unrestricted, meaning the university can use the resources as it chooses. Of the $80 million, $63 million will go toward Howard University, and $17 million will go to the school’s College of Medicine. This marks one of the largest single donations to Howard in its 158-year history.
“This historic investment will not only help maintain our current momentum, but will help support essential student aid, advance infrastructure improvements, and build a reserve fund to further sustain operational continuity, student success, academic excellence, and research innovation,” Wayne A.I. Frederick, Howard interim president and president emeritus, said in a statement.
Howard University says the gift comes at an “opportune time” as the federal government shutdown has delayed annual federal appropriations that the school receives to support student success, academic programming, research, and university and Howard University Hospital operations.
Owing to the shutdown that started Oct. 1, new grant awards from the Department of Education have been halted because nearly 95% of non–student aid staff were furloughed, leaving only essential staff to keep working.
Key programs like the HBCU Capital Financing Program, which offers renovation and construction-loan subsidies, are now left in limbo. It’s particularly unfortunate timing, considering the Education Department announced in September a $495 million increase for HBCUs and tribally controlled colleges and universities (TCCUs) for FY 2025.
At the same time, however, education experts say this action is hard to reconcile with the Trump administration’s desire to dissolve the DOE.
“If [the Trump administration] actually … cared about HBCUs and tribal colleges, then you would not see such a big attack on other sectors of higher education,” Mike Hoa Nguyen, an associate professor of education at UCLA, recently toldThe American Prospect.
MacKenzie Scott’s DEI dedication
Scott’s gift to Howard builds on other recent DEI-focused donations. She donated $42 million to 10,000 Degrees, a Bay Area nonprofit focused on expanding college access for low-income and largely non-white students, alongside other eight-figure commitments to Native student scholars and HBCU endowments through the United Negro College Fund (UNCF).
In September, she made a $70 million UNCF donation as part of a campaign to bolster pooled endowments across 37 HBCUs, a strategy designed to increase revenue streams and narrow historical wealth and funding gaps.
In October, the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund announced a $40 million gift from Scott—twice the size of her previous donation to the organization in 2021, representing 20% of its fundraising so far.
Scott emphasizes, though, that while the dollar amounts are high, they don’t fully represent their level of impact.
“When my next cycle of gifts is posted to my database online, the dollar total will likely be reported in the news,” she wrote in an Oct. 15 essay on her organization Yield Giving’s site. “But any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into the world this year.
“The potential of peaceful, non-transactional contribution has long been underestimated, often on the basis that it is not financially self-sustaining, or that some of its benefits are hard to track,” she continued. “But what if these imagined liabilities are actually assets?”