MacKenzie Scott is bypassing the Ivy League and rewriting the $79 billion higher ed playbook by giving to HBCUs and community colleges

Americans gave an estimated $78.8 billion to colleges and universities in fiscal year 2025, a 4% year-over-year increase that barely kept up with inflation, according to survey findings released Tuesday from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

But that figure doesn’t fully illustrate where the money is actually going or which schools have historically been left out. Between 2015 and 2019, the average Ivy League school received 178 times as much philanthropic funding as the average HBCU...