$25 million latest gift announced by Craig and Elizabeth E. White builds on family’s earlier $50 million donation to school
The Dean and Barbara White Family Foundation has added a new chapter to one of American higher education’s most consequential philanthropy stories in hospitality and real estate, committing $25 million to Purdue University to fuel a major expansion of its hospitality programs and related talent pipelines.
Announced in mid-February as part of Purdue’s $4 billion “Victories & Heroes” campaign, the gift will underwrite both physical growth and programmatic innovation, positioning Purdue to train a larger, more industry-ready cohort of future “hospitalitarians” at a time when the sector is reshaping itself after years of disruption.
The $25 million commitment from the Merrillville-based foundation, created by hotel magnate Dean White and his wife Barbara, is targeted at three interlocking priorities: expanding the White Lodging–J.W. Marriott, Jr. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management in West Lafayette, building out Purdue’s new Indianapolis presence for hospitality and tourism programs, and strengthening the experiential learning ecosystem anchored by the Union Club Hotel and White Lodging partnership.
Purdue officials are casting the gift as both a continuation and an escalation of a decades-long relationship with the White family that has already transformed the campus hospitality landscape and helped reimagine how a public research university can function as a training ground for luxury service and hospitality leadership.
That relationship reached a new level in 2023, when the White Family Foundation committed $50 million to Purdue to help launch the reimagined Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business and to name its undergraduate institute for White Lodging founder Bruce White. The gift, the largest monetary contribution ever made to Purdue’s School of Management/Business, established the Bruce White Undergraduate Institute as the flagship undergraduate component of the Daniels School and served as the lead investment in a business school strategy explicitly focused on educating technology-grounded, market-driven business leaders. Purdue President Mung Chiang framed the naming as “particularly meaningful,” describing Bruce White as one of the most prominent Boilermakers in the university’s history and emphasizing that the gift would enable Purdue to educate exceptional business graduates who can create and grow competitive companies in a technology-driven, free‑market economy.
For Purdue, the timing of the new $25 million hospitality gift is strategic.
The hospitality and tourism industry, battered by the pandemic and then whiplashed by rapid rebounds in travel, meetings, and experiences, is facing structural workforce and leadership gaps just as guest expectations rise around personalization, technology integration, and experiential quality.
Purdue’s White Lodging–J.W. Marriott, Jr. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management (HTM) already ranks among the nation’s leading programs, with a curriculum that blends operations, analytics, and guest experience, but the university has signaled that growth in both scale and scope is essential if Indiana is to keep pace with demand across hotels, foodservice, events, sports tourism, and convention business.
The White Family Foundation’s new gift is meant to accelerate that trajectory and push Purdue to the forefront of talent development for a sector that is simultaneously local in footprint and global in competitive set.
Central to this strategy is the expansion of the school’s physical and academic footprint. Purdue has already announced that its hospitality and tourism management program will debut at Purdue in Indianapolis in fall 2026, placing one of the country’s top-ranked HTM programs directly into the heart of Indiana’s capital city. With its dense cluster of hotels, restaurants, major league and collegiate sports venues, and a convention and events infrastructure that punches above its weight nationally, Indianapolis offers a living laboratory for students to move seamlessly between classroom and industry floor. The new White Family Foundation funding is expected to support this pivot, helping underwrite faculty, facilities, and industry-integrated programming that can leverage Indianapolis’ hospitality ecosystem for both undergraduate and graduate learning.
At the same time, the gift strengthens the home base in West Lafayette, where Purdue and White Lodging have built what many in the field now view as a model for deep, practice-driven hospitality education: the Union Club Hotel. Following a prior combined $30 million gift from the White family that funded a top-to-bottom transformation of the 182-room property, the Union Club Hotel has been repositioned as a luxury boutique hotel within Marriott’s Autograph Collection that doubles as a fully operational teaching lab for students. Students enrolled in HTM rotate through front-of-house, culinary, events, revenue management, and other operational units via dedicated experiential courses such as HTM 18101: The Union Club Hotel Experience, and many also take part in the LAUNCH Hospitality Management Immersion Program that embeds them in hotel roles over extended periods.
That integrated model has drawn external validation. In 2025, Purdue HTM, White Lodging, and the Union Club Hotel partnership received the Willie McCool Breakthrough Award from the International Council on Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Education (ICHRIE) in recognition of what the organization called a transformative industry–academic collaboration.
The award citation highlighted how deeply the Union Club Hotel is woven into the curriculum, with students not only working shifts but also shadowing department leaders, participating in simulated brand audits, and even staying overnight at the property to view operations through both guest and manager lenses. The White Family Foundation’s new $25 million commitment is expected to build on this platform, scaling the number of students who can take advantage of such high-touch learning while also layering in new program components as hospitality technology and guest expectations evolve.
The hospitality-focused gift also sits alongside the foundation’s earlier $20.8 million commitment that launched the Dean V. White Real Estate Finance program, an initiative that helped catalyze the broader reinvention of Purdue’s School of Management as a School of Business. In Purdue’s own telling, that real estate gift seeded the realignment of curricula around the intersection of business, property, and technology and led directly into the conversations that produced the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business and the Bruce White Undergraduate Institute. Together with the $50 million Daniels School gift and the transformational Union Club Hotel investment, the new hospitality commitment underscores how the White family has become a multi-pillar partner in Purdue’s push to integrate hospitality, real estate, and business education into a coherent talent pipeline.
The $25 million hospitality gift fits squarely within Purdue’s “Victories & Heroes” campaign narrative, which emphasizes both student success stories and the donors who enable them. Campaign materials frame the White family as emblematic of this partnership approach, with multi-generational ties to hotel development and an explicit interest in elevating hospitality as a respected, intellectually demanding profession rather than a fallback job.
By channeling significant capital into facilities, scholarships, and signature programs that blur the line between classroom and industry, the foundation is effectively betting that Purdue can supply not just workers, but leaders—general managers, asset managers, brand strategists, and entrepreneurs—who can shape the next era of hotels, resorts, and tourism businesses.
For the hospitality industry, the move comes amid intensifying competition for talent. Hotel and restaurant operators across the United States report difficulty recruiting and retaining staff at all levels, with particular pressure on mid-level managers who must navigate tighter margins, new technologies, and more demanding guests.
Purdue’s HTM program, with its blend of operations, analytics, and leadership training, is positioned as one solution to that challenge. By expanding both in West Lafayette and Indianapolis, the university aims to widen access to hospitality education for Indiana residents and beyond, while placing students into markets where they can quickly transition into full-time roles with regional, national, and global brands.
The White Family Foundation’s focus on higher education aligns with its broader mission portfolio, which has emphasized community development, economic opportunity, and talent-building in Indiana and the Midwest. Beyond Purdue, the foundation has supported regional initiatives tied to workforce skills and quality-of-place enhancements, often with a hospitality or placemaking component reflective of the White family’s roots in hotel development. The Purdue partnership, however, stands out for its scale and for how tightly it is integrated into the university’s long-range academic plan, from physical campus design to program naming rights and cross-disciplinary collaborations in business, real estate, and data science.
Purdue leaders have suggested that the new $25 million gift will also unlock further opportunities for collaboration with industry partners beyond White Lodging, including global hotel chains, independent restaurant groups, sports and entertainment venues, and destination marketing organizations.
With a presence in Indianapolis, the school can more easily plug into citywide events, major conventions, and recurring sports properties, giving students a front-row seat to the operational and strategic challenges that shape urban hospitality economies. In West Lafayette, meanwhile, the Union Club Hotel and surrounding hospitality assets will continue to serve as a sandbox for innovation in guest experience, sustainability, and technology deployment, from contactless check-in to data-driven revenue management.
Taken together, the White Family Foundation’s recent gifts underscore the growing importance of philanthropy in reshaping hospitality and business education and, by extension, the industry’s talent and leadership pipelines.
At Purdue, a multi-decade relationship with one donor family has yielded not just named schools and renovated buildings, but an integrated ecosystem in which students can test themselves daily against the realities of running a modern hotel or hospitality enterprise while also accessing cutting-edge business and real estate training.
With $25 million in fresh fuel for hospitality layered on top of the $50 million Daniels School gift and earlier transformational commitments, that ecosystem is set to expand—across campuses, into Indiana’s capital, and, ultimately, into the boardrooms and back-of-house corridors where the next generation of hospitality and business leaders will decide what service, experience, and community impact look like in the years ahead.