Bloomberg Donates $1.8 Billion To Johns Hopkins To Make Admissions ‘Need-Blind’
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will donate $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins University, which he attended, to provide more financial aid to low-and middle-income students.
It is reported to be the largest private donation to higher education, and will allow the university to eliminate loans from financial aid packages for incoming students beginning in the next school year and expand grants for those in financial need.
“No qualified high school student should ever be barred entrance to a college based on his or her family’s bank account. Yet it happens all the time,” Bloomberg wrote in an op-ed published in the New York Times on Sunday announcing the gift.
“Denying students entry to a college based on their ability to pay undermines equal opportunity. It perpetuates intergenerational poverty. And it strikes at the heart of the American dream: the idea that every person, from every community, has the chance to rise based on merit,” he wrote.
The donation announced on Sunday is in addition to the some $1.5 billion that Bloomberg, 76, has donated to the school in past years to support research, teaching and financial aid.
Bloomberg noted in his op-ed that his first donation to the school the year after he graduated was $5.00, which was all he could afford.
Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels told the Washington Post that “as a consequence of Mike Bloomberg’s extraordinary gift, we will be fully and permanently need-blind in our admissions and be able to substantially enrich the level of direct assistance we provide to our undergraduate students and their families.”
Bloomberg, who with great fanfare last month re-registered as a Democrat, is rumored to be planning a run for president in 2020.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
