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Kyrie Irving, a point guard for the National Basketball Association’s Brooklyn Nets, paid off tuition balances for nine graduating seniors at Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania.
The donations were first reported by a journalist for The Athletic.
A spokeswoman for Lincoln, which recently received a $20 million donation from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, said Irving “paid the remaining balance that the nine students owed to the University, financially clearing them to graduate.” The university did not disclose the amount of the donation.
Irving's decision to target student debt bears some resemblance to that of billionaire businessman Robert F. Smith, who paid off the college debt of 400 graduating seniors at Morehouse College, an HBCU in Atlanta, in 2019. Smith's donation amounted to a $34 million payoff of the students' debt.
