$100 million latest gift from “Giving Pledge” signatories Byron and Tina Trott to university is the next chapter in a deeply personal, steadily expanding campaign to ensure that young people from rural areas are not shut out of the educational and professional opportunities that helped shape their own lives

Byron and Tina Trott’s latest gift to the University of Chicago is best understood not as an isolated act of generosity, but as the next chapter in a deeply personal, steadily expanding campaign to ensure that young people from rural America are not shut out of the educational and professional opportunities that helped shape their own lives.

With a $100 million commitment from Trott Family Philanthropies, the couple is anchoring the new Trott Center for Excellence in Rural America, a 10-year initiative that UChicago expects will grow to $300 million through matching university resources and additional philanthropy. Its ambition is unusually comprehensive: reaching students in rural high schools, helping them prepare and apply for college, providing loan-free aid and on-campus support, and then connecting them with internships, employers, mentors, and career networks after graduation.

The center bears the Trott name, but its central message is about students whose names may never be familiar to admissions officers, employers, or major philanthropists—until someone notices their potential. “There is extraordinary undiscovered talent in rural America,” Byron Trott said. “Too often, young people simply are not aware of the opportunities available to them or prepared to pursue them.”

For the Trotts, that belief comes from lived experience. Both are first-generation college graduates from small towns and families of modest means. In their Giving Pledge letter, they describe parents who emphasized hard work, integrity, respect, and service, and who gave regularly to their church and community despite having limited financial resources.

Those lessons, the couple wrote, shaped not only their success but also their view that good fortune carries an obligation to create opportunity for people coming behind them.

Byron Trott grew up in Union, Missouri, and went on to become one of the most influential dealmakers in American finance, first at Goldman Sachs and later as founder, chairman, and co-chief executive of BDT & MSD Partners.

Yet the philanthropic through-line in the Trotts’ giving has been less about elite institutions for their own sake than about access to the knowledge, relationships, and confidence that allow talented students to imagine larger possibilities.

The couple’s 2021 decision to join the Giving Pledge made that principle public: they committed to directing the majority of their wealth to philanthropy, calling it potentially “the most important work” they would undertake together as a family.

Education has been the clearest expression of that commitment. Long before the newly announced center, the Trotts supported scholarships for rural high school scholar-athletes and low-income Horatio Alger Student Scholars—young people who have demonstrated resilience in the face of financial hardship or other adversity. They have also invested in practical, career-facing programs at UChicago, including the Jeff Metcalf Internship Program and the university’s Careers in Business initiative.

The Metcalf program particularly reveals the Trotts’ approach. Founded and funded by Trott in 1997, it has grown into a major bridge between college and the working world, placing more than 5,000 UChicago students in summer jobs each year.

Rather than treating an education as complete at the classroom door, the program emphasizes the experiences that make a degree more actionable: an employer’s reference, a first professional setting, a clearer understanding of a field, or an introduction that becomes a job opportunity later.

That same logic now sits at the core of the Trott Center. The new initiative is not only intended to help rural and small-town students enroll at UChicago. It is designed to stay with them.

The university plans to expand academic services, mentoring, community building, leadership development, internships, professional networks, and career preparation. In practical terms, the model recognizes a reality that students from families with less experience navigating selective higher education often know instinctively: admission can open a door, but succeeding after arrival may require a support system, a vocabulary for professional life and relationships that cannot be assumed.

The Trotts’ rural strategy began taking institutional form in 2018, when Byron Trott asked UChicago leaders a deceptively straightforward question: “how many undergraduate students from small towns and rural communities were enrolled in the College? ”

The inquiry became a catalyst. UChicago expanded its rural recruitment and support efforts, and first-year enrollment from rural and small-town communities has risen 160% over the past decade, the university says.

That year, the Trotts also helped establish rootEd Alliance, an organization that places dedicated college and career advisers in rural high schools. The program is built on the idea that a lack of opportunity often begins with a lack of information.

A student may be academically capable of attending a strong college, entering a skilled trade, pursuing an apprenticeship, or securing a meaningful first job but may lack a counselor with the time, resources, or specialized knowledge to help map the path.

rootEd seeks to fill that gap by partnering locally with schools, communities, states, and employers.

This academic year, the organization’s advisers are expected to serve 340 rural schools across six states, and it has reached more than 100,000 students to date.

When the Trotts joined the Giving Pledge in 2021, rootEd was operating in Tennessee, Missouri and Texas.

They pointed to a structural disparity that has since become central to their public case for rural investment: rural students account for roughly 30% of the nation’s high-school population, they wrote, yet receive less than 5% of philanthropic support.

The couple also helped create UChicago’s Emerging Rural Leaders program in 2019, bringing high-school juniors and seniors from rural communities and small towns to Hyde Park for a week of academic exploration, conversations with faculty and students, and a firsthand introduction to college life in Chicago.

It is a small but meaningful intervention in the geography of aspiration. For a student who has never visited a nationally known university, the difference between an abstract idea of college and a lived experience of it can be profound.

In 2023, the Trotts extended the work beyond a single campus with a $20 million gift to establish the STARS College Network—short for Small Town And Rural Students.

Housed at UChicago, the network initially joined 16 colleges and universities around the shared goal of recruiting, enrolling, and supporting students from rural communities and small towns.

The Trotts followed with an additional $50 million commitment in 2024, allowing the network to grow to 32 member institutions; UChicago says eight more schools are expected to join in the coming months.

STARS represents an important evolution in the Trotts’ giving. Their philanthropy is not confined to underwriting scholarships at one university or operating one pipeline program.

It seeks to change how a wider set of highly selective institutions sees rural talent, reaches students, evaluates their context, and supports them after enrollment.

At its best, that kind of networked philanthropy can create a multiplier effect: an advising relationship in a rural high school may lead to an application; a campus visit may lead to an admission; aid and mentoring may lead to graduation; an internship may lead to a job; and a graduate’s success may reshape what younger students in the same community believe is possible.

The new Trott Center brings those strands together. It incorporates early outreach, financial aid, student success, and career development on the UChicago campus, while also supporting the expanding STARS network. Its goals include strengthening connections among secondary educators, employers, and colleges so that rural students have greater access to professional possibilities—and employers, in turn, have greater access to a talent pool they may not traditionally reach.

That final point distinguishes the Trotts’ philanthropy from a conventional scholarship model. They are not simply financing tuition. They are investing in a long chain of opportunity, from a rural student’s earliest awareness of postsecondary options to the networks and work experiences that shape an adult life. The beneficiary is not only the individual student but potentially the student’s family, hometown, employer, and the next young person who sees someone from a similar background succeed.

The Trotts’ philanthropic interests also extend beyond rural education. In their Giving Pledge letter, they noted that their three adult children had embraced the family’s giving commitment and would help bring attention to issues including criminal and social justice reform, climate change and addiction. But education—especially opportunity for rural and low-income students—remains the family’s most developed and visible commitment.

In that sense, the Trott Center is both an institutional gift and a family statement. It reflects the couple’s conviction that talent is broadly distributed, even when access to counselors, financial resources, elite campuses, and professional networks is not. And it translates a personal story—two first-generation college graduates from modest small-town backgrounds—into a large-scale effort to make the path to higher education and careers less dependent on where a student happens to grow up.