NEW YORK — MacKenzie Scott, one of the world’s wealthiest women and most influential philanthropists, is now known for her “no strings attached” surprise grantmaking. But, as a Princeton University sophomore, she learned what it was like to be on the receiving end of generosity.
Facing the prospect of dropping out if she couldn’t come up with $1,000, Scott was crying when her roommate, Jeannie Tarkenton, found her and got her dad to loan Scott the money.
“I would have given MacKenzie my left kidney,” Tarkenton told the Associated Press recently. “Like, that’s just what you do for friends.”
Today, Scott’s net worth is around $34 billion, according to Forbes. In October, Scott wrote that Tarkenton’s act is among the many personal kindnesses she has considered as she has donated more than $19 billion of the wealth she amassed mostly through Amazon shares as part of her 2019 divorce from company founder Jeff Bezos. And when Tarkenton started Funding U, a lending company that offers last-gap, merit-based loans to low-income students without co-signers, Scott said she jumped at the chance to help.
A quarter century passed between the end of their sophomore year and Funding U’s creation, a period when Tarkenton realized just how many more students were being pushed into her former roommate’s position by the rising cost of college. That Scott took an interest in her old friend’s mission to help economically disadvantaged students finance school is unsurprising. Her unusual gifts — which she rarely discusses or discloses outside of essays and a database on her website, Yield Giving — tend to focus on issues of equity, higher education and economic security.
But the revelation of Scott’s Funding U support offers a new glimpse into her investments. Scott wrote last year that she would invest in “mission-aligned ventures” led by “undercapitalized groups” that focus on “for-profit solutions” to the challenges that her philanthropy seeks to address. However, this is among the few confirmed publicly.
“She’s looking for innovative ways to create opportunity for those that don’t have it,” said Marybeth Gasman, who runs Rutgers’ Center for Minority Serving Institutions and follows Scott’s donations. “I have to say, as somebody who went to school on a Pell Grant and who came from an extremely low-income family, that’s really meaningful.”
Scott, in many ways, resembled the exact students that Funding U seeks to serve. Tarkenton recalled the undergraduate Scott as a “hardworking student with very good grades” who was “highly focused” and had already