$10 million matching gift from alumni Steve and Karen Sanger opens new doors for student scholarships

DePauw University has received a $10 million matching challenge gift from alumni Steve and Karen Sanger, Class of 1968, establishing a powerful new engine for student scholarships at a moment when the institution has pledged to meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need for incoming first-year students starting in fall 2026.

The challenge, which anchors The DePauw Promise, is structured to invite broad participation from alumni, parents and friends, effectively doubling the impact of new scholarship commitments and accelerating DePauw’s ability to welcome talented students from every background regardless of financial circumstances.

Announced as DePauw ramps up its Bold, Gold & You! comprehensive campaign, the Sangers’ $10 million commitment is both a lead gift and a public call to action, designed to unlock additional endowed and current-use scholarship resources as donors step forward to meet the match.

Every qualifying gift made in response to the challenge will trigger additional funds from the Sangers, extending the reach of their philanthropy across multiple cohorts of students and signaling confidence in DePauw’s long-range financial aid strategy, which will see the university distribute an anticipated $66 million in aid and scholarships in the 2026–27 academic year.

President Lori S. White praised the gift as an “incredible” act of loyalty and foresight, noting that the couple’s own DePauw experience shaped their lives and careers and that their challenge will help ensure future generations can access the same transformative residential liberal arts education.

For Steve and Karen Sanger, the new challenge is the latest chapter in a philanthropy portfolio that has increasingly focused on leadership development and opportunity creation at their alma mater and beyond. Both members of DePauw’s Class of 1968, they often describe their student years as a formative period when a small, highly engaged campus opened doors that would not have been available at a larger institution and provided the leadership experiences that underpinned their later success.

That conviction first translated into major support for the university with their earlier $20 million gift to launch the Sanger Leadership Initiative at DePauw, which integrates leadership learning into the liberal arts through new practicum courses, co‑curricular programs, visiting speakers and experiential opportunities such as the DePauw Leadership Crisis Challenge.

Steve Sanger’s professional path underscores the leadership themes that now define the couple’s giving. After DePauw, he earned an MBA from the University of Michigan and began his career at Procter & Gamble before joining General Mills in 1974 as a marketer. Over the next three decades, he rose through a series of senior roles, becoming vice president and general manager of the Northstar Division in 1983, president of Yoplait USA in the mid‑1980s, and president of the Big G cereal division by 1988, where he oversaw the company’s largest and most profitable business.

He was named senior vice president in 1989 and executive vice president in 1991; joined the General Mills board as vice chairman in 1992; was elevated to president in 1993; and became chairman and chief executive officer in 1995, posts he held until his retirement as CEO in 2007 and as chairman in 2008. Under his leadership, General Mills grew into one of the world’s largest food companies and developed a reputation as a global hub for corporate leadership development, cementing Sanger’s status as a prominent voice on corporate culture and talent.

Even after stepping down from General Mills, Steve Sanger remained a significant figure in corporate and civic life, serving on the boards of major companies such as Target and Wells Fargo & Co., where he was chairman from 2016 to 2018, as well as organizations including Catalyst, the Guthrie Theater and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

His long-standing ties to DePauw deepened when he joined the university’s Board of Trustees in 2018 and later received the Old Gold Goblet, one of DePauw’s highest alumni honors, recognizing his professional achievements and service. These experiences have informed his belief that leadership is a set of behaviors best learned through practice, a view he articulated when the couple’s earlier $20 million gift created the Sanger Leadership Initiative to turn the campus into a “leadership laboratory” that would shape future generations of ethical, resilient leaders.

Karen Ogren Sanger’s trajectory complements and reinforces the couple’s focus on education, law and community service. At DePauw, she studied economics and English, disciplines that helped shape a broad analytical and communication skill set before she went on to complete graduate studies at Northwestern University and William Mitchell College of Law.

Her professional career began in secondary education, where she taught at the high-school level, and later evolved into a legal practice focused on small business law, giving her firsthand insight into entrepreneurship, regulation and the challenges facing smaller enterprises. Alongside her professional work, she has been an engaged DePauw volunteer, serving on the Washington C. DePauw Society executive committee, the Board of Visitors and as an active fundraiser and organizer for reunion programs and the Annual Fund, roles that kept her closely connected to the campus community and its changing needs.

The Sangers’ philanthropy extends beyond DePauw to other institutions committed to leadership education. At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Steve and Karen made a $20 million gift to establish the Sanger Leadership Center, a hub that builds on and expands the Ross Leadership Initiative’s hands‑on programs such as the Impact Challenge and Crisis Challenge, as well as offerings like Story Lab, Leaders Academy and skills-based workshops designed to help students practice and refine their leadership abilities.

The center provides personalized feedback and coaching to students and serves as a resource for faculty developing new leadership pedagogy, a model that aligns closely with what the Sangers have helped create at DePauw. Across both campuses, their giving reflects a consistent philosophy: leadership is learned, not innate, and intensive, experience-based programs can help students translate their values into action in business, civic life and the nonprofit sector.

On DePauw’s campus, the Sanger Leadership Initiative has already begun to reshape how students encounter and practice leadership. Directed by Rebecca Alexander, the program has sparked new curricular innovation, including practicum courses that treat the campus itself as a laboratory for studying leadership dynamics and real-time decision-making. Alexander notes that the initiative has prompted more intentional conversations about leadership across disciplines and that students are being encouraged not only to take on roles but also to craft clear narratives about how their experiences are shaping their values, philosophy and approach to leading others. Students like Raechel Meyers ’28 point to Sanger-supported programming—such as visiting speakers and the Ethics, Civics and Leadership cohort—as catalysts that pushed them out of their comfort zones, expanded their networks and clarified the kind of leaders they hope to become.

The new $10 million scholarship challenge is tightly woven into DePauw’s larger financial aid and campaign strategy. Through The DePauw Promise, the university has committed that, beginning with the class entering in fall 2026, it will meet 100 percent of the calculated financial need for every incoming first-year student, using a combination of scholarships, grants, work study and federal loans to close the gap between a family’s ability to pay and the full cost of attendance.

Financial aid officers calculate that cost by considering direct charges such as tuition, housing, meals and fees, along with indirect expenses like books, travel and personal costs, then subtracting the expected family contribution derived from FAFSA or, for some students, other financial documentation, to determine the student’s overall need.

To maintain this promise, DePauw will reassess students’ need-based aid each year while seeking to keep institutional scholarships and grants consistent for those who remain in good standing, a policy that offers families a greater degree of predictability even as costs and circumstances change.

The Bold, Gold & You! campaign, which carries a headline goal of $575 million, elevates scholarship endowment growth as a central priority to sustain The DePauw Promise over the long term and to sharpen the institution’s competitive edge in recruiting high-achieving students who might otherwise enroll elsewhere.

Within that framework, the Sangers’ challenge gift functions as a strategic multiplier: by matching new scholarship commitments, it accelerates DePauw’s ability to build permanent endowment funds whose annual payouts will support financial aid in perpetuity. The university has already pointed to recent gifts across the campaign that total several million dollars for scholarships as early evidence that donors are responding to the call to expand access, and the Sangers’ match is expected to broaden participation even further by making it possible for donors at varying levels to see their contributions doubled in impact.

For DePauw’s leadership, the Sangers’ latest commitment is as much a signal to the wider alumni community as it is a financial catalyst. President White and campaign leaders have framed the challenge as an invitation for graduates to reflect on how their own opportunities at DePauw shaped their lives and to “pay that forward” by investing in current and future students, particularly those for whom cost might otherwise be a barrier to enrollment.

In this sense, the Sangers’ philanthropy embodies the dual themes of leadership and access: one major set of gifts builds the infrastructure to help students develop as leaders, while another underwrites the scholarships that ensure a diverse, talented group of students can come to campus in the first place.

As the university moves deeper into the public phase of Bold, Gold & You!, the couple’s $10 million matching challenge for student scholarships places them once again at the center of DePauw’s efforts to define what opportunity and excellence mean in a new era of higher education.