On Sunday, Howard University announced that Scott, who is worth an estimated $35.6 billion, donated $80 million to the historically Black college. True to 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 be allocated 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,” said Wayne A. I. Frederick, Howard’s interim president and president emeritus, 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 the operations of the university and Howard University Hospital.
Due to the shutdown that began on October 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 working. Key programs like the HBCU Capital Financing Program, which offers renovation and construction loan subsidies, are now left in limbo.
The timing is particularly unfortunate considering that in September, the Education Department announced a $495 million increase for HBCUs and Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs) for FY 2025.
At the same time, however, education experts find this action difficult to reconcile with the Trump administration’s desire to dissolve the Department of Education.
“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 told The 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, Scott made a $70 million donation to the UNCF as part of a campaign to bolster pooled endowments across 37 HBCUs. This strategy is 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 October 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?”
https://fortune.com/2025/11/03/mackenzie-scott-80-million-gift-howard-university/