Morehouse College.
Denver billionaire pledges to pay off debt for graduating seniors.
Billionaire Denverite Robert F. Smith announced to a class of about 400 graduating seniors that he and his family plan to pay off the entire class’ student loans.
Smith is the CEO and chairman of Vista Equity Partners, a software and technology investment firm, and a philanthropist who spoke at the class of 2019 commencement Sunday morning. He also received an honorary degree from the school and had committed to a $1.5 million gift to the school that Morehouse College planned to use for scholarships and a new park, the school said in a statement.
The fourth-generation Coloradan grew up in a mostly black, middle-class neighborhood, according to his Facebook page, and he attended a school that had been recently integrated. His mother carried him at the March on Washington. Smith interned at Bell Labs in high school and developed a reliability test for semiconductors, the page said. He earned a bachelor of science in chemical engineering at Cornell University.
Smith was the commencement speaker at the University of Colorado Denver’s graduation in 2017, the university where his father earned his doctorate 45 years prior. He talked about the “profound impact” the university had on his father and his family.
He spoke about his neighborhood in northeast Denver, across the street from City Park, and the experience as a child attending a newly desegregated school. He talked about the way the whole neighborhood came together to celebrate his father’s achievement during the civil rights movement, and how much upbringing and community support contribute to future successes.
“They believed that our imperfect nation was becoming more perfect every day. And they believed that by conducting themselves and raising their families with integrity, they were contributing to that process of perfection in a very real way,” he said. “So we celebrated every sign that the barriers of inequality were collapsing that the doors of opportunity were opening.”