Venture Capitalist and Spouse Give$116.8-Million for Scholarships at Oxford
By Caroline Bermudez
Contributor
July 22, 2012 | Read Time: 2 minutes
How much: $116.8-million
Who gave it: Michael Moritz, and his wife, Harriet Heyman. Mr. Moritz is chairman of Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif. He led the company to invest early in Google, Yahoo, and PayPal.
Who got it: The University of Oxford
What the gift will be used for: To provide scholarships for undergraduate students whose families make less than $25,000 annually. The gift will be made in three installments, with each portion matched by the university’s investment returns from its endowment and followed by a challenge for donors to contribute equal amounts, to reach a goal of $467-million.
Connections to Oxford: The Welsh-born Mr. Moritz earned a master of arts degree in history from Oxford in 1976. His father also attended the university, on a scholarship. In 2008, Mr. Moritz donated $50-million to Christ Church, a college at Oxford.
How the gift came about: At an Oxford alumni event in San Francisco, Andrew Hamilton, the university’s vice chancellor, talked about the rising cost of education and its consequences for financially strapped students. When Mr. Moritz learned that Oxford has 1,000 needy students at any one time, he decided to give enough to help all of them.
Why they gave: Mr. Moritz’s father and other relatives fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and received scholarships to attend college. Mr. Moritz himself earned a scholarship to attend business school at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “So many of the companies with which we’ve been very deeply involved for decades have been started by individuals who came from straitened circumstances and received spectacular educations at terrific institutions on scholarship,” he says. “The power of well-directed scholarships to extremely talented students has been a leitmotif that has been part of my entire personal and professional life.”
What the donors hope the gift will achieve: That colleges in Britain will raise private money to help needy students.
