MacKenzie Scott Invests In Friend’s Student-Loan Startup — The Same Roommate Who Once Loaned Her $1,000

Decades after a $1,000 lifeline kept her in college, MacKenzie Scott, now a billionaire philanthropist, is giving back. The Princeton alum has invested in Funding U, a lending platform founded by her former roommate to help low-income students stay in school, an AP report said.

The report further added that, back in her Princeton days, Scott nearly had to abandon her education when she couldn’t scrape together $1,000 for tuition. Distraught and in tears, she confided in her roommate, Jeannie Tarkenton, who stepped in and persuaded her father to cover the shortfall. “I would have given MacKenzie my left kidney,” Tarkenton recalled to the Associated Press. “That’s just what you do for friends.”

Fast forward to today: Scott’s fortune stands at roughly $34 billion, according to Forbes. In an October essay, she reflected on that act of generosity as one of many kindnesses that shaped her approach to giving. Since her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Scott has donated more than $19 billion to causes promoting equity and opportunity. So when Tarkenton launched Funding U, a company providing merit-based, last-gap loans to low-income students without co-signers, Scott didn’t hesitate to back the mission.

“She’s looking for innovative ways to create opportunity for those that don’t have it,” Marybeth Gasman, who runs Rutgers’ Center for Minority Serving Institutions and follows Scott’s donations told AP. “I have to say, as somebody who went to school on a Pell Grant and who came from an extremely low-income family, that’s really meaningful.”

“I wanted to combine capital from people who were participating in this because they cared about the underlying person,” Tarkenton told AP, “and also, knowing that scale of philanthropy wasn’t quite big enough, bring to the table some sort of market solution alongside that capital.”