Schuler Scholar Program abruptly cancels $10M in support

A Chicago-area philanthropist has backed out of a pledge to offer $10 million in scholarships to 1,250 low-income and first-generation school college students weeks earlier than the beginning of the autumn semester.

Former Abbott Laboratories govt Jack Schuler introduced final month that the Schuler Schooling Basis was suspending its two-decades-old Schuler Scholar Program, which gave every recipient $10,000 over 4 years ($2,500 a yr) in addition to grants for medical insurance and emergency support, WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate, reported Wednesday.

To be eligible for the scholarship—and to get entry to the tutoring and counseling this system offered—highschool college students needed to preserve a excessive grade level common, take Superior Placement programs and attend common conferences. The scholarship may solely be used to attend a choose variety of small liberal arts establishments, together with Elon College in North Carolina and Pomona School in California.

However Forbes reported that dangerous investments in health-care shares fueled the monetary collapse of the Schuler Schooling Basis, in addition to Schuler’s private wealth; his internet price dropped from $1.1 billion in 2021 to round $200 million earlier this yr.

In March, the muse introduced that the scholarship program was shutting down, pledging to honor current scholarship awards.

However in July, the muse backed out of that promise.

“It’s with a heavy coronary heart that now we have shared some very tough information that the Schuler Scholar Program has confronted vital monetary challenges and has needed to shut down its operations,” Mitchell Morgan-Dunham, this system’s director of faculty counseling, wrote in a July 17 electronic mail to college students, in keeping with Forbes. “Regardless of our greatest efforts to handle these challenges and proceed some help for students, this system is unable to fund scholarships beforehand offered to varsity students and highschool college students.”

Although that electronic mail included an apology, the scholars scrambling to determine easy methods to pay for faculty subsequent yr say it’s not sufficient.

“That doesn’t make me really feel any higher,” Marcus Jackson, a Schuler scholarship recipient who will possible must get a second job if he desires to remain at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, advised WBEZ. “It doesn’t pay the payments. It positively doesn’t ship us by means of faculty.”