Launched by Byron Trott, a network of top universities looking to recruit rural students is doubling in size.
Byron Trott" width="970" height="774" data-caption='Banker Byron Trott hails from a rural town himself. <span class="media-credit">Jeff Schear/Getty Images for UNICEF</span>'>
Billionaire investment banker Byron Trott, who mowed lawns and sold jeans in his rural hometown of Union, Mo. to help pay for his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, is spending $150 million to aid prospective students from rural areas across the country. Trott, the chairman and co-CEO of merchant bank BDT & MSD partners, and his wife, Tina, last year gave $20 million to help form a coalition of 16 universities known as the Small Town and Rural Students College Network (Stars). The network, which includes the University of Chicago, Columbia University and Vanderbilt University, aims to increase the admission of students from rural communities and small towns into top schools. Now, as the coalition prepares to double in size, Trott is funneling an additional $150 million over the next 10 years to bolster its mission.
Stars will add 16 schools, including Stanford, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of California—Berkeley, to its network. “Stars and its affiliated programs are opening doors in higher education for high-achieving rural students they might not have found otherwise, and the students, campuses and our economy will all be the better for it,” said Trott in a statement. In its first year of operation, Stars has seen a more than 20 percent increase in applications from rural and small-town students and a 13 percent increase in admitted students across its network, according to Marjorie Betley, executive director of Stars.
Trott, whose hometown boasts a population of around 12,000, is the son of a telephone line repairman and dress shop owner. He first made a name for himself during a nearly 30-year tenure at Goldman Sachs (GS), where he eventually became vice chairman of investment banking and worked closely with prominent clients like the Walton Family, Thomas Pritzker and Warren Buffett. Buffett once described Trott as “far better than any investment banker with whom we have talked” in a Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) shareholder letter. Trott left Goldman in 2009 to establish his own firm, BDT & Co, which merged in 2023 with investment firm MSD Partners. He currently has an estimated net worth of $3.1 billion, according to Forbes.
Trott isn’t the only billionaire to give back to his rural community. Glen Taylor, founder of the Taylor Corporation, in 2023 donated the income from $172 million worth of farmland parcels to benefit communities across rural Minnesota, where he grew up, and Iowa. And last year, the Korean real estate tycoon Lee Joong-keun gave around $70,000 each to his former classmates and the 280 households in his rural village of Unpyeong-ri, Suncheon, located outside of Seoul.
The roots of Stars began in 2018 when Trott approached the University of Chicago and asked how many rural students were on campus. “We didn’t know how to answer that question because it wasn’t a demographic we had ever tracked,” Betley, who is also deputy director of admissions at the University of Chicago, told Observer.
“It caused a lot of soul searching,” she said. After discovering that only around 3 percent of the incoming class came from rural areas, Trott helped launch a program at the university that recruited rural students for summer programs.
Stars was established in 2023 as Trott looked to scale the initiative’s impact even further. “At the end of the day, we can only impact such a small number of students, and the need is huge,” said Betley. According to Stars, students from rural America are half as likely to graduate from a selective university as those from metropolitan areas, with college admissions offices often neglecting rural areas and small towns due to the distance and cost of traveling. Counselors working in these areas are also typically overburdened, with the average caseload in rural communities measuring at 310 per counselor.
As Stars expands, it will fund an estimated $7.4 billion in financial aid over the next decade. And Trott’s $150 million gift will support the network’s mission and those of its partners like the organization RootEd Alliance, which places college and career advisors across rural schools. Since its creation, the coalition has visited some 1,100 rural high schools across 49 states, offered free campus trips and monthly virtual panels with admissions staff, and provided math preparation courses and tutoring at no cost. These programs have translated into real-world impact at schools like the University of Chicago, which will see rural and small-town students make up 10 percent of its incoming freshman class this year.
With its expanded network, Stars hopes it can enhance its impact on closing an “information gap” between prospective students living in large cities and those hailing from rural areas, according to Betley. “Students who live in rural and small town areas aren’t getting face time with admissions counselors, they’re not getting the same information, they’re not able to ask questions in the same ways that a lot of their peers do,” she said.
