Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott had her banner giving year in 2025, with an eye-popping total of $7 billion in donations across a variety of organizations. In all, she’s donated more than $26 billion in just the past few years.
But one of her main efforts has gone toward higher education, whether to public institutions that lost funding during the Trump administration or to historically Black colleges and universities.
One hotspot for her philanthropic donations is California, where she’s contributed a whopping $461 million to public education institutions, according to EdSource. Those donations have come over the course of just four years, between 2021 and 2025.
In all, she’s donated to 16 different institutions, with an average gift size of about $28.8 million. California State University, Northridge (CSUN), has received the highest cumulative amount from Scott at $103 million, including a $63 million gift in 2025 and a $40 million gift in 2021. Many of those campuses have been navigating budget shortfalls. CSUN itself faced a $16.3 million deficit, making the unrestricted, no-strings nature of Scott’s gifts especially valuable at the time.
And in Scott’s philanthropic fashion, those are unrestricted donations, meaning the universities could use them as they choose without oversight from Scott’s organization, Yield Giving.
“MacKenzie Scott’s increased investment reflects confidence in both our mission and in our demonstrated ability to deliver transformational outcomes for students,” Robert Taylor, chair of the CSUN Foundation Board of Directors, said in a statement at the time of the 2025 gift. The CSUN gifts also fit a pattern for Scott, who tends to donate to diverse organizations. Of CSUN’s 36,000 students, about 70% are first-generation college students and 60% come from historically underrepresented groups.
Similarly, Scott made two donations to UC Merced, including a $20 million gift in 2021 and a subsequent $38 million gift in 2025. Those funds went toward student success initiatives, faculty research programs, and capital projects, and UC Merced is also largely an institution for first-generation college students. Cumulatively, UC Merced has received the second-largest gift from Scott in the past four years, with $58 million in donations.
Scott’s giving philosophy
The UC Merced gift came hot off the heels of a $50 million donation to California State University, East Bay, a gift the school called “transformational.” And like essentially all of Scott’s other gifts, the school made a plan for how to use the funding—not Scott herself. The university decided to use the gift toward initiatives including student success, career outcomes, expanding paid internship opportunities, and creating and expanding a permanent endowment. California State University, East Bay is also a public institution enrolling roughly 13,000-15,000 students and is known for being one of the more ethnically diverse universities in the country.
Scott even wrote in a 2024 essay published on her Yield Giving blog that she prefers to donate to “mission-aligned ventures” and “generally undercapitalized groups like women and people of color.”
“In this way, the money can help address these issues twice,” she wrote, “first by advancing economic mobility and unlocking the innovation and social benefit that comes from incorporating diverse needs and perspectives in the world being constructed around us, and next in the hands of experienced non-profit teams creating value through their transformative models of care and change.”
Scott’s California giving wasn’t limited to universities. Her grants reached community colleges from Pasadena to Porterville and four K-12 school districts, including a $20 million gift to Fresno Unified School District in 2022. About 90% of her California education gifts, though, went to higher education.
To be sure, Scott’s unrestricted model hasn’t completely gone without some complications. In Santa Barbara, where City College received a $20 million gift in 2021, the college’s foundation disclosed in early 2026 that about $10.5 million had been spent on its Promise Program without board authorization, prompting the trustees to open an investigation.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
