Smalltown students benefit as billionaire banker pledges $150M

Byron Trott, who grew up in a small Missouri town and became one of the world’s top bankers, will spend $150 million over 10 years to help more private colleges and public universities recruit rural students.

The new donation builds on a $20 million initiative his family foundation started last year with schools such as Yale, Ohio State and the University of Chicago, his alma mater. The “Stars” program will now double the number of schools to 32, including Stanford, Amherst College and the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Trott Family Philanthropies will also boost funding to help prepare high school students for college.

“Stars and its affiliated programs are opening doors in higher education for high-achieving rural students they might not have found otherwise,” Trott, the billionaire chairman and co-chief executive officer of merchant bank BDT & MSD Partners, said in a statement. “And the students, campuses and our economy will all be the better for it.”

Rural students lag behind the rest of the country in college attendance, and Trott is working to bridge that gap. His pitch is finding an increasingly receptive audience as selective private schools seek to expand geographic and socioeconomic diversity, especially after last year’s Supreme Court ruling that race can’t be used in admissions. 

The latest gift from Trott Family Philanthropies will also add more support for high school students to learn about college options, financial aid and potential career paths, in part through an organization called the Rooted Alliance.

Trott, 65, the son of a telephone-line repairman and dress-shop owner, started Chicago-based BDT in 2009 and went on to merge it with Michael Dell’s MSD Partners early last year. Previously, Trott had spent almost three decades at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where he worked with clients including Warren Buffett and the Pritzker, Walton and Koch families. 

His initiative to boost rural students started at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Vice President for Enrollment Jim Nondorf and offered funding to attract more kids from small towns. Rural students make up about 10% of this year’s freshman class of about 1,700, Nondorf said. 

Trott’s funding for Stars, which is formally known as the Small Town and Rural Students College Network, goes directly to the schools and helps admissions offices hire dedicated staffers to focus on rural recruiting. In the program’s first year, college representatives toured parts of the country jointly and as individuals, visiting 1,100 high schools in 49 states.