Community Impact!

When Heather Zoldak—now the chief advancement officer for Harper College in Illinois—heard that philanthropist MacKenzie Scott had made an $18 million gift to the college, she responded with shock.

“Honestly, I wondered if it was real,” she says with a laugh.

It was: Scott’s foundation included Harper among the 287 “high-impact organizations” it selected to receive a total of more than $2.7 billion in June 2021. Of those organizations, 21 were community colleges.

“Higher education is a proven pathway to opportunity, so we looked for two- and four-year institutions successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved,” Scott wrote in a blog post.¹

Gifts like Scott’s aren’t unusual for elite private universities or flagship state institutions. But community colleges are rarely the beneficiaries of such largesse. Only 1.5 percent of the $58 billion in gifts to higher education in 2023 were directed to community colleges, according to research by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.² That’s despite community colleges enrolling about 30 percent of the country’s higher education students, according to statistics from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.³

But a handful of visionary philanthropists are recognizing that community colleges, which serve millions of students with diverse needs but often limited resources, are places where their investments can have an exponential impact…