How One Billionaire Lost Millions And Left Underserved Scholarship Students In Limbo

On March 21, the roughly 70 employees of the Schuler Education Foundation, based in the affluent suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, were summoned to an emergency all-hands meeting. Over the past two-plus decades, the nonprofit founded and funded by a former president of healthcare giant Abbott Laboratories, Jack Schuler, had spent at least $150 million counseling and tutoring more than 1,800 low-income students from Chicago and Milwaukee-area high schools to help them gain admission to elite colleges; those colleges in turn covered most (if not all) of the students’ tuition and other costs.

The employees, who first had to certify they wouldn’t record anything, were let into a Zoom room where the nonprofit’s executive director Joanne Bertsch read from a script announcing that the foundation would shut down on May 24. Everyone would be let go except for a skeleton crew of seven college counselors left to support students through August.

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