Business 4 min read By Bethany Hadley
Wealth manager gives $100m to Indiana MBA school that launched his career
Jeff and Cheryl Thomasson have donated $100 million to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, the largest individual gift in the university's history, supporting graduate education and the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Jeff Thomasson, the founder of Indianapolis-based wealth management firm Oxford Financial Advisors, and his wife Cheryl have donated $100 million to Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, the institution where he earned his MBA in 1981. The gift, announced last week, is the largest from an individual in the university's history and will support graduate education at Kelley as well as the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
The Thomassons have now given more than $111 million to Indiana University in total. In recognition of the donation, the university's board of trustees has approved naming the Kelley School's graduate division after Thomasson. The gift arrives at a moment when philanthropic support for higher education is at record levels but public confidence in universities is under pressure.
Thomasson built Oxford Financial Advisors from a master's essay he wrote while at Kelley, where he specialised in investments and taxation. He founded the firm at age 23 with $20,000 in graduate school debt during the high-interest, high-unemployment economy of the early 1980s. His father, a construction worker, was disabled in an accident and died while Thomasson was in college; his mother worked as a bank teller. A local oil distributor who had employed him since his teens paid for his college education.
He grew the business largely through cold calling, holding roughly 1,000 meetings a year and working six days a week, according to a 2011 Forbes profile. At the time, Oxford Financial's decision to adopt a fee-only model rather than collecting commissions was unconventional, though fees are now an industry standard. The firm is today one of the largest independent registered investment advisors in the United States, with more than $38 billion in assets under advisement, 25 managing directors across seven offices, and over 700 family and institutional clients.
In a statement, Thomasson said the Kelley MBA programme set the foundation for his career and that the gift was a way of paying forward the investment others had made in him. He added that he hoped it would encourage others to give, creating opportunities that would ripple across generations.
The donation lands amid a broader boom in education philanthropy. Giving to education, mostly colleges and universities, reached an all-time high of roughly $92 billion in 2025, growing faster than any other category, according to the Giving USA report. Yet public faith in higher education has weakened: just 38% of Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, down from 57% when Gallup began tracking the question in 2015. Rising costs, doubts about return on investment, and the rise of artificial intelligence in education are among the main concerns cited.
The value of an MBA has itself been questioned since the emergence of AI. Some executives argue the degree is unnecessary, while others credit it with their success. Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has said corporate America has too many MBAs running it, whereas Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who earned his MBA from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, has praised such programmes for giving him the knowledge and confidence to tackle complex questions at the intersection of business and technology.
Other philanthropists have also directed fortunes towards higher education, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and MacKenzie Scott. The Thomassons' gift will additionally support the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, the Indiana University institution that researches and publishes the Giving USA report documenting the giving boom that includes their own donation.
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