Kim Mazzuca runs a nonprofit in San Rafael, California, whose students rarely lead a news release. They start at community college because it is what the family can afford. They work jobs while they study. Many help cover the household income at home. This fall, MacKenzie Scott and her Yield Giving gave Mazzuca’s organization, 10,000 Degrees, $42 million. The money is unrestricted. It is the largest gift in the organization’s history, and Scott does not ask recipients to report back on how it was spent.
The gift now sits underneath a five-year strategic plan, covering fiscal years 2027 through 2031, that reads less like a wish list than a set of wagers. 10,000 Degrees intends to double the number of college students it supports each year, from 5,000 to 10,000. It plans to reach 155,000 new students from low-income backgrounds by 2031 and to expand into five more regions, in California and beyond it. Mazzuca, the organization’s president and chief executive, has said the gift is roughly double the nonprofit’s annual budget. It arrived the way Scott’s gifts usually arrive, quietly, and then the work of deciding began.
What the Organization Actually Does
10,000 Degrees has worked with students from low-income backgrounds since 1981. Its model is not a single scholarship check. It pairs money with people: high school students get college access programming, college students get scholarships and near-peer mentors, community college students get help transferring, and graduates get career guidance. Fellows and advisers stay close enough to know when a student’s financial aid fell through or a work schedule changed.
The record is the argument. Since 1981, the organization has supported 92,000 students across 250 colleges and awarded more than $123 million in scholarships. In the past fiscal year alone, it helped students secure more than $70 million in additional financial aid, money that was already owed to those students and might never have been claimed without help. Eighty percent of its four-year college students graduate, and 85 percent of its graduates finish debt-free. That last number is the one with the longest tail. A degree earned without loans is a different inheritance than a degree purchased with them, and for a first-generation graduate it is often the first asset the family balance sheet has ever held.
A Plan Written in Percentages
Scott’s money did not change the plan’s direction, Mazzuca told Inside Higher Ed. It changed the speed. The organization can make up-front investments now instead of waiting for the fundraising to catch up.
The targets are specific. The four-year community college transfer rate is supposed to climb from 44 percent to 60 percent. The six-year bachelor’s degree rate among transfer students is supposed to rise from 53 percent to 70 percent. The share of college students in career success programming is supposed to go from 30 percent to 80 percent. Under the plan, 100,000 high school students will get college access programming, 20,000 college students will get scholarships and career guidance, and 5,000 graduates will get help launching careers. Technology and predictive analytics are part of the build, meant to tell advisers which students need intervention first, while the human advisers remain the intervention.
The gap the plan is aimed at is plain in the organization’s own figures. Among students from high-income backgrounds, 74 percent enroll in college and 58 percent hold a bachelor’s degree by age 24. For students from low-income backgrounds, enrollment falls to 42 percent and graduation to 14 percent. 10,000 Degrees has spent 46 years working the space between those two columns.
Trust, With a Balance Sheet
The strategic plan the organization published alongside the gift treats part of Scott’s money as permanence rather than program spending. Reporting by Inside Philanthropy on how the organization allocated the gift found that its board directed $5 million of the $42 million into its endowment, bringing that fund to $10 million, with the rest invested in growth over the next several years. The detail matters because of what came before it. In January 2025, months before Scott’s team called, 10,000 Degrees had quietly begun a $25 million campaign, half of it meant to build exactly that $10 million endowment. Scott’s single gift finished the endowment half and left tens of millions for expansion on top of it.
That is the pattern of Scott’s giving at its most recognizable. She has put $70 million into UNCF’s pooled endowment for HBCUs, $63 million into Morgan State University, and $50 million into the Native Forward Scholars Fund, each time handing established institutions capital and declining to supervise it. The 10,000 Degrees gift is the same bet placed one level down, on the intermediary that follows a student from a high school classroom to a first job. “Over 45 years of helping students overcome barriers to higher education, we’ve learned what’s possible when students have the resources, guidance and support to succeed,” Mazzuca said in the organization’s announcement.
The plan’s first students arrive with the 2027 fiscal year. Mazzuca has described where she expects the returns to show up, and it is not in a gala program. “We need more students to move through their education and land meaningful careers so they can go back into their communities and make positive change,” she said.
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