Morehouse College Graduates’ Student Loans to Be Paid off by Billionaire
May 19, 2019
By: Audra D. S. Burch, David Gelles and Emily S. Rueb
Source: The New York Times
The 396 young men began the day as students in caps and gowns, ready to graduate from Morehouse College — full of hope, but burdened in most cases with the debts that financed their education.
Then their commencement speaker went off-script with an extraordinary pledge: the newly minted alumni of the historically black college in Atlanta would go forth into the world student debt-free.
Robert F. Smith, the billionaire investor who founded Vista Equity Partners and became the richest black man in America, told the crowd that he and his family would pay off the entire graduating class’s student debt, freeing them to begin their next chapter, whether it was a master’s program, a position with Teach for America or an internship at Goldman Sachs, without loan payments to worry about.