This fall, Morgan State University wrote to 2,100 of its students with a direct offer: if money was the thing standing between you and the end of the semester, say so. Six hundred students said so.
The offer was possible because of a decision made in Baltimore weeks earlier. When Morgan State announced a $63 million gift from MacKenzie Scott in October 2025, the largest single donation the university had ever received, President David K. Wilson put $60 million of it straight into the unrestricted endowment and set $1 million aside for students in severe financial need. The gift came with no program to fund, no building to name, no reporting schedule, no conditions to negotiate. It came from a donor who has made that absence the point.
This week, in an assessment published by the National Urban League, its president and CEO, Marc H. Morial, argued that Scott’s method amounts to a new model for American philanthropy. The numbers behind the claim are large. Scott has disclosed $26.4 billion in gifts to more than 2,500 organizations since 2019, including $7.17 billion in 2025 alone. More than $1 billion of it has gone to historically Black colleges and universities, institutions that philanthropy spent generations funding last and least. But the presidents who received the money keep returning to the same detail, and the detail is not the size. It is the trust.
Three weeks last fall
Between mid-October and early November 2025, eight HBCUs announced gifts from Scott totaling about $387 million. Each one was unrestricted, and most were the largest in their school’s history. Morgan State went first, on October 15. Howard University followed on November 2 with $80 million, divided between $63 million for the university and $17 million for its College of Medicine. Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University each announced $38 million the next day. Virginia State University received $50 million, Alcorn State University $42 million, and Alabama State University and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore $38 million each. Prairie View A&M announced $63 million of its own that same season.
The fall wave landed on top of an earlier one. Scott had given many of the same schools record-setting gifts in 2020, Morgan State’s $40 million among them, so her two gifts to that one university total $103 million. In September 2025, before the campus announcements began, she gave $70 million to the United Negro College Fund for a pooled endowment shared by its 37 member institutions, part of a campaign to build that pooled fund to $370 million. Each member school holds a $5 million stake. The Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents public HBCUs, received $70 million as well.
What the freedom buys
The clearest evidence of what unrestricted money does over time sits at Bowie State University, which received $25 million from Scott in 2021. The university invested $22.5 million of it. Its endowment, about $8 million when the gift arrived, passed $49 million within four years, helped along by other donors who followed where Scott had gone first. “Unrestricted gifts are the unicorn, the white whale of the fundraising industry,” Brent Swinton, Bowie State’s vice president for philanthropic engagement, told Inside Higher Ed.
Morgan State expects its $60 million endowment deposit to return $4 million to $5 million a year, every year, long after the 600 students who asked for help this fall have graduated. At Spelman, interim president Rosalind Brewer aimed the college’s $38 million at scholarships, with juniors and seniors who rely on Parent PLUS loans at the front of the line. Federal caps on those loans take effect next year, and the gift is meant to close the gap for students close to finishing. The college is also rebuilding its technology infrastructure, including new tools for teaching artificial intelligence. “That makes this donation, quite honestly, a lot more generous than most people would realize,” Brewer said.
Howard’s $80 million arrived in the middle of a federal government shutdown that had delayed the annual appropriations the university depends on. Interim president Wayne A. I. Frederick said part of the money would become a reserve fund, and part would reach students whose family members had been furloughed or had lost food benefits. “We want to give students some temporary relief,” he said. Restricted money rarely moves at that speed. This money could, because the decision about what it was for belonged to Howard. “It provides us with a lot of freedom to do what we need to do,” Frederick said.
Partnership is the word they keep using
Wilson chose a specific word for what a second Scott gift meant at Morgan State. “This is more than philanthropy,” he said. “It’s a partnership in progress.” Morial reached for the same word in his assessment this week. “This is not charity, it’s partnership,” he wrote, “and it’s a blueprint.”
The contrast is with how large gifts usually work. A major donation typically arrives with a purpose attached: a program to run, a name for a building, a schedule of reports, sometimes a say in decisions. Scott’s team does its own research, selects the recipients, and sends the money with almost no conditions. Her stated logic, from a 2021 essay, is to find institutions “successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved,” a phrase she paired with her description of higher education as “a proven pathway to opportunity.” Then she lets them work.
The institutions receiving that confidence have seldom been first in line for it. One analysis of 2019 foundation grants counted $5.5 billion in support for the eight Ivy League universities and $45 million for 99 HBCUs. Swinton put the accumulated gap in a single sentence: “If you took all 103 HBCU endowments and added them up today, they still wouldn’t come close to any of the top 10 endowments” at predominantly white institutions.
The model reached Black-led community institutions before it reached this scale on campus. In the fall of 2022, 25 Urban League affiliates shared more than $100 million from Scott. The Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh’s $6 million was the largest gift in that affiliate’s 104-year history, and the affiliate folded it into its own strategic planning rather than a donor’s instructions. The approach has its frictions. Inside Philanthropy has reported that some recipients choose not to publicize their gift amounts at all, wary that news of a windfall could cool the regular donors they still depend on. Trust, it turns out, has to be managed on both ends.
Scott has answered the question of scale in her own way. Writing about the recent cycle of gifts, she noted that the reported total, upward of $300 million to HBCUs in that round alone, was “a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into the world this year.” The largest checkbook in the story insists on being the smallest part of it.
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