Life
Robert F. Smith creates initiative to lessen student debt at historically black colleges and universities
Smith, the richest Black person in the United States, previously paid off the debt of an entire Morehouse College graduating class.
Robert F. Smith, self-made billionaire and noted philanthropist has a plan to help alleviate the burden of student debt for those attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
Smith’s new non-profit, the Student Freedom Initiative, will launch at up to 11 HBCUs in the fall of 2021 (the list of schools has yet to be finalized), offering students in STEM majors a more flexible alternative to the traditional high-interest private loans. Smith hopes to support 5,000 new students every year, once the initiative is underway.
It will launch with a US$50 million donation from the Fund II Foundation, which Smith founded, and is hoping to raise another US$500 million by October. Combined with additional investments and graduates’ income-based repayments, the initiative is designed to become “self-sustaining.”
“You think about these students graduating and then plowing so much of their wealth opportunity into supporting this student debt, that’s a travesty in and of itself,” Smith explained to Time. He later added, “I think it’s important that we do these things at scale and en masse because that’s how you lift up entire communities.”
Smith the founder and CEO of private equity and venture capital firm – Vista Equity Partners – made headlines in 2019 for single-handedly paying off the student debt for Morehouse College’s graduating class, at a total cost of about US$40 million.
“I was looking at 400 students 400 years after 1619,” Smith told reporters of that day, when he spoke at Morehouse’s commencement. “And they were burdened. And their families were burdened. They had taken on a tremendous amount of debt to get that education. And liberating them was the right thing for me to do. Honestly, I didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal. I mean, globally. I didn’t realize how many people understood the pain and debilitating effect that student debt has for decades – not just on that individual but on families.”
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