A private equity billionaire sponsors 300 New York City school kids - and writes them all personal notes
The Blackstone chairman and CEO sat down to chat on Bloomberg anchor Betty Liu's podcast Radiate about his interviewing style, what it means to be successful, and how he nearly got into Harvard.
The richest man in private equity also talked about how he was writing to about 350 K-12 students about their grades, absences, and school subjects.
He told Liu: "I got involved with the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, which is the parochial schools in New York City. And that's an amazing thing where my wife and I are sponsoring about three hundred kids I think, something like that."
He said around 70% of the kids are either at or below the poverty line, and 90% are minorities. The system graduates 99% of the kids, he said, where the kids would have a graduation rate of 50% to 60% in the public school system.
"I look at all the report cards, and kids are doing well in certain subjects, or not as well, or they've been absent more, or something," Schwarzman said. "I write them a personal note on my stationery, cause I think that's a good thing for them to get. I comment on something in their report card, so they know it's been read, and that somebody cares about them. And then when they graduate, you know, you meet them."
Scholarship fund
The students are a part of the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, which helps support roughly 7,500 underprivileged students in K-12 Catholic Schools around New York City annually. On average, these students live in households with an income of $24,000.
Recent contributions from the Schwarzman couple have made it possible for the fund to extend scholarships to an additional 2,900 students starting fall 2016.
"I mean I could meet them earlier, there's only so many things I can physically do, but it's really neat, and they write you notes during the year thanking you for changing their lives," Schwarzman said.
"I mean that's why I do it, because I want these kids to understand that not only is somebody paying for them... but that somebody cares about them."
Schwarzman, who is worth more than $11 billion, says it is a rewarding process. He's seen the students transform their futures throughout their schooling.
"You see the changes in these people," Schwarzman said. "You ask them, 'What are you doing? (They say) 'I'm going to be an accountant, I'm going to be a nurse, I'm going to college for this.'"
"You know... they're going to be... good members of society, they're going to be paying taxes, they're going to have nice families," Schwarzman said. "They're going to have what we would call a very good, middle income type of life which if they didn't have those educational opportunities, they wouldn't necessarily have that outcome."
Schwarzman is Jewish, while his wife, Christine Schwarzman, who is Catholic, is a Trustee of the Inner-City Scholarship Fund. About a third of students who receive scholarships from the fund are not Catholic.
In the field of higher education, Schwarzman has also created the Schwarzman Scholars, which aims to teach university students about China.
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