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A Chicago-area philanthropist has backed out of a pledge to give $10 million in scholarships to 1,250 low-income and first-generation college students weeks before the start of the fall semester.
Former Abbott Laboratories executive Jack Schuler announced last month that the Schuler Education Foundation was suspending its two-decades-old Schuler Scholar Program, which gave each recipient $10,000 over four years ($2,500 a year) as well as grants for health insurance and emergency aid, WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate, reported Wednesday.
To be eligible for the scholarship—and to get access to the tutoring and counseling the program provided—high school students had to maintain a high grade point average, take Advanced Placement courses and attend regular meetings. The scholarship could only be used to attend a select number of small liberal arts institutions, including Elon University in North Carolina and Pomona College in California.
But Forbes reported that risky investments in health-care stocks fueled the financial collapse of the Schuler Education Foundation, as well as Schuler’s personal wealth; his net worth dropped from $1.1 billion in 2021 to around $200 million earlier this year.
In March, the foundation announced that the scholarship program was shutting down, pledging to honor existing scholarship awards.
But in July, the foundation backed out of that promise.
“It is with a heavy heart that we have shared some very difficult news that the Schuler Scholar Program has faced significant financial challenges and has had to shut down its operations,” Mitchell Morgan-Dunham, the program’s director of college counseling, wrote in a July 17 email to students, according to Forbes. “Despite our best efforts to manage these challenges and continue some support for scholars, the program is unable to fund scholarships previously provided to college scholars and high school students.”
Though that email included an apology, the students scrambling to figure out how to pay for college next year say it’s not enough.
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Marcus Jackson, a Schuler scholarship recipient who will likely need to get a second job if he wants to stay at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, told WBEZ. “It doesn’t pay the bills. It definitely doesn’t send us through school.”
