$100 million new gift to university from Jeffrey and Benita Thomasson hands forward the head start they once received

Jeffrey H. Thomasson was 23 years old when he walked out of Indiana University with a freshly earned MBA and did the thing that almost nobody that age does: he started his own firm. That was 1981. Oxford Financial Group, Ltd. grew from that first improbable act of nerve into one of the largest registered investment advisory firms in the Midwest.

Forty-five years later, he and his wife, Benita L. Thomasson, gave $100 million back to the place where it started—the largest gift from an individual in the history of Indiana University—and a moment that reframes what a business school can be asked to do for the people who pass through it.

Combined with everything the couple has already given, their lifetime support of IU now exceeds $111 million. In recognition, the IU Board of Trustees has approved naming the Kelley School’s graduate division the Jeffrey H. Thomasson Graduate School of Business—a name that will now sit above 19 graduate programs drawn together across Bloomington and Indianapolis into a single, coherent enterprise.

It is worth pausing on the symmetry. The graduate business school that gave a young man a credential and the confidence to use it will carry his name for as long as the university stands.

What makes the gift genuinely interesting is that it is not a building. The money targets the part of graduate education that is hardest to fund and easiest to neglect: student success, academic innovation, and endowed faculty positions that let a school compete for the people who actually change how students think.

Under the new structure, students across those 19 programs gain real-world mentorship, immersive learning, advanced AI training, access to emerging technology, and stronger career services. Graduate students will also receive direct financial help through a newly created Thomasson Scholars Program, which builds on the Thomasson Fellows Program that has quietly supported Kelley undergraduates for years.

That last detail is the tell of a serious philanthropist: rather than starting something new for the sake of a headline, the Thomassons built the next floor on a structure they had already proved works.

And it does work. The Thomasson Fellowship, established through the Thomasson Foundation the couple created in Indianapolis in 1992, honors socially conscious undergraduates and connects them to the Kelley Institute for Social Impact—five more students were named Fellows this past March, in the program’s fourth year, with the first class graduating this spring.

All five were Indiana students. That is not incidental. Across three and a half decades of giving, the Thomassons have kept returning to the same conviction: talent is evenly distributed, and opportunity is not, and the gap between the two is something a family can actually close, one student at a time.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the $5 million within this week’s package directed to the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IU Indianapolis, the world’s first school devoted entirely to the teaching and study of philanthropy.

The money expands the Thomasson Scholarship, which allows undergraduate and graduate students to pursue an IU education regardless of financial circumstance while preparing for careers in philanthropy, nonprofit leadership, and community impact. Calling it a scholarship undersells it.

The award is all-encompassing: up to four years of tuition and fees, room and board, books, and support for a semester of study abroad. For a first-generation student from a small Indiana town, that is not tuition assistance. That is a different life.

The way those scholarships are awarded says as much about the donors as the amount does. Each year the Lilly Family School holds a competition called Pitch Your Passion, in which high school seniors and early undergraduates identify a social, economic, or cultural problem that keeps them up at night, then build and present a plan for how they would marshal resources to fix it. Past pitches have taken on mental health, sexual abuse, homelessness, and support for new mothers.

The two strongest are named Thomasson Scholars and receive the full ride. This past February, the competition distributed more than $94,608 to 12 students, with two full Thomasson Scholarships and partial awards from $1,000 to $6,500 for the rest. The Thomassons chose a mechanism that asks young people to prove they already think like givers—and then funds them for it.

The deeper history is more personal still. Through the Thomasson Foundation, Jeff, Benita, and their family have awarded hundreds of scholarships to college students over many years, including to the children of full-time missionaries around the world.

Two of the awards Jeff has spoken of most warmly are the smallest: annual scholarships for graduating Zionsville High School seniors in honor of Lloyd and Jane Taylor and the Oliver L. Warner Educational Scholarship through the Boone County Community Foundation.

Those two families, by his own account, had a life-changing impact on his youth. A man who now signs nine-figure gifts has spent decades making sure the people who believed in a young Indiana kid are still named out loud every spring.

That is the throughline of this entire philanthropy: gratitude, expressed structurally, at scale, without much interest in noise.

IU has recognized him before—the Kelley School’s Distinguished Entrepreneur Award in 2000, the university’s Bicentennial Medal in 2020, and service on the advisory board of Kelley’s Johnson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. By his firm’s own description, he is involved in numerous private foundations and simply and thoroughly enjoys philanthropy.

The couple is also explicitly committed not just to giving but to building the field itself—developing the study of philanthropy and the next generation of leaders who will practice it. It is one thing to fund good works. It is another, rarer thing to fund the discipline that teaches other people how.

Record gifts tend to be measured in superlatives, and this one has earned them: the biggest individual gift IU has ever received, a named graduate school, and more than $111 million in lifetime support.

But the truer measure will show up quietly, over years, in the students who never have to choose between a philanthropy degree and their family’s finances, in the MBA candidate who gets AI training that makes her employable in a market that did not exist when Jeff Thomasson was 23, and in the Zionsville senior who finds out that a stranger’s gratitude toward two neighbors from the 1960s is now paying for her first year of college.

Indiana University just announced the $100 million gift.

What the Thomassons actually gave away was the head start they once received — multiplied and handed forward.