Roy Vagelos and his wife, Diana, ramped up their ongoing campaign to help poor college students avoid crushing loads of debt with their biggest gift yet — $250 million to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
The couple is directing $150 million of the donation to endow scholarships aimed at helping to eliminate student-loan debt for medical students who qualify for financial aid — about half of the medical school’s students. The remaining $100 million will be divided equally between medicine programs and basic science research.
Dr. Vagelos served as chairman of the Merck & Company pharmaceuticals corporation, where he worked for nearly two decades. Earlier in his career he was chairman of the Department of Biological Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis.
Mr. and Ms. Vagelos were the children of Greek immigrants who relied on scholarships to attend college. He graduated from the medical school in 1954, and she graduated from Barnard College in 1955.
The two met on Columbia’s campus in 1951 and married in 1955 and have been donating to scholarship funds at Barnard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania — where he got a bachelor’s degree — for the past five decades.
“This idea of giving to young people the kind of support that allowed us to pursue our own educations at Penn, Barnard, and Columbia has been a driving force in our lives for some time, said Mr. Vagelos in a news release. “We want (the medical school) graduates to be able to do what they love to do in their lives and in the medical profession. We’ve been lucky enough to have the chance to make a difference, and we want to be sure future Columbians will have the same opportunity.”
Including this latest gift, the couple has given Columbia a total of $310 million for scholarships, a building, and medical programs, and they landed on The Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the most generous donors for the $50 million they gave to Columbia’s medical center in 2010 for a new building.
University officials announced the latest contribution Monday, and the medical school will be renamed for the donors.
