That certain kind of kindness doesn’t make itself known. It just shows up at the right time, without any conditions or paperwork. In the 1980s, that’s what happened at Princeton University one afternoon while a sophomore named MacKenzie was crying in her dorm room about not having enough money.
To stay in school, she needed $1,000. She would have to leave without it. It was her roommate Jeannie Tarkenton who found her that way. But Tarkenton didn’t say anything to make MacKenzie feel better. Instead, she called her dad and asked him to lend her the money. “I would have given MacKenzie my left kidney,” Tarkenton told the Associated Press. “Like, that’s just what you do for friends.”
It’s the kind of line that sounds different when you think about what came after it. MacKenzie Scott, the same MacKenzie, is now one of the richest women in the world. She is worth about $34 billion. Since her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, she has given away more than $19 billion. This makes her one of the most important donors of our time. She has never forgotten about that loan.
The MacKenzie Scott college roommate loan story came up again in October, when Scott wrote an essay about how acts of kindness can have a big impact on other people. She said Tarkenton’s act was one of the acts she’s carried with her as she’s given away huge amounts of money—quietly, without press releases, and often by giving organizations big checks they didn’t ask for. It’s a way of giving that has puzzled and interested people for years. This story might help you understand where it comes from a little better.
Between that Princeton dorm room and now, Tarkenton hasn’t stayed still. While working in Atlanta for a nonprofit that helped adults learn to read and write, she started to notice something that was hard to ignore: students from low-income families were dropping out of college at much higher rates than their wealthier peers. It wasn’t a matter of ability. It was money—specifically, the fact that there weren’t any easy-to-get loans that weren’t too expensive for students who didn’t have credit or parents who could co-sign.
For a different reason, she started Funding U, a company that lends money. Funding U doesn’t look at applicants’ credit scores, which are more likely to show how wealthy the applicant’s family is than how smart they are as a person. Instead, they use student transcripts, internship records, and information about how likely it is that someone will finish their degree, get a job, and pay back the loan. It’s a calmer and more human way to think about risk.
Scott jumped in. She gives what Tarkenton calls “junior debt”—about 30 cents of every dollar lent—at low interest rates, which means she gets paid back later and earns less than the market would normally return. Banks pay the last 70%, in part because the federal government requires them to invest in communities that aren’t getting enough help. It’s not a gift. That is clear to Tarkenton. Scott will get her money back in the end, just like she did when she paid back an informal loan from Tarkenton’s dad.
It’s still not clear how much Scott has committed to Funding U because she doesn’t usually talk about her investments in anything but essays and her giving database, Yield Giving. But the way the arrangement is put together fits a bigger pattern. Last year, Scott wrote that she planned to invest in mission-driven businesses run by groups that don’t have enough money. She said she was looking for for-profit solutions to problems that her charitable work also tries to solve. Funding U seems to be one of the clearest examples of that mentioned goal coming true.
As I watch this story develop, I get the sense that it reveals a deeper truth about how kindness works: not as a one-time act, but as a long chain of influence. A dad gives his daughter’s friend some money. That friend makes a lot of money and supports a lending company that helps other students stay in college without having to cry in their dorm rooms because they can’t afford to stay. It’s a different scale. The urge is still the same.
Marybeth Gasman, who runs the Center for Minority Serving Institutions at Rutgers, said, “She’s looking for new ways to give people who don’t have it opportunities.”
Maybe that’s the most honest way to describe what the MacKenzie Scott college roommate loan started: a young understanding that was clearly never lost of what it’s like when someone believes in you before you’ve given them a reason to.
