MacKenzie Scott has sent more than $700 million to more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities and related organizations in 2025, and one of her latest gifts pushed her cumulative support for HBCUs past $1 billion. In November, Howard University received $80 million, with $17 million of that set aside for the College of Medicine. Elizabeth City State University got a $42 million gift in early April, the donation that carried Scott’s total HBCU giving over the billion-dollar mark.
The scale of the money matters because college philanthropy has long flowed unevenly. Americans gave an estimated $78.8 billion to colleges and universities in fiscal year 2025, up 4% from a year earlier, but the heaviest gifts have traditionally gone to already wealthy institutions. Between 2015 and 2019, the average Ivy League school received 178 times as much philanthropic funding as the average HBCU. Total Ivy League gifts in that span topped $5.5 billion, while HBCUs collectively took in $303 million.
Scott’s campaign has altered that picture fast. Over the past five years, she has donated more than $1.2 billion to HBCUs and well over $26 billion to thousands of organizations overall. In 2025 alone, she gave $70 million to the United Negro College Fund, aimed at strengthening pooled endowments for private HBCUs, and $70 million to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents public HBCUs. She also gave $63 million each to Morgan State University and Prairie View A&M, and $50 million apiece to Bowie State, Norfolk State, Virginia State and Winston-Salem State.
That surge has landed while federal support has become harder to count on. In September, the Education Department announced a $495 million increase for HBCUs and tribally controlled colleges and universities for fiscal year 2025, but new grant awards were later halted as of Oct. 1 because nearly 95% of non-student aid staff were furloughed. Mike Hoa Nguyen said the squeeze on other parts of higher education undercut any claim that HBCUs and tribal colleges were being protected, arguing that if the administration truly cared about them, it would not be attacking the broader sector around them.
Scott has not limited her giving to HBCUs. She has also expanded her higher education donations to community colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions and tribal colleges, a spread that suggests she is trying to fix the imbalance from several directions at once. Dr. Michael Lomax put it more bluntly, saying Scott is rewriting the book on individual philanthropy and making a huge difference. The unanswered question is no longer whether her money can move the HBCU sector; it already has. The question is whether universities that have depended on public funding and old fundraising patterns can build on her gifts fast enough to make the gains last.
