Tony James

But man, there's going to be some huge fortunes made in that.

So I'm optimistic about private capital, but it evolves.

Well, in 2018, a friend of mine who had worked for Obama in their Department of Education came in and said, and he had been an M&A banker at DLJ and then I think Bank of America.

And then he went into the government and he ran the student loan program for the government.

And he came in and said, you know, I'm out of here.

The one thing that we didn't clean up in the financial crisis was student loans and maybe we should come up with something.

And we started thinking about that.

And we started working with some historically black colleges and universities around income share agreements so that a graduate would get his college education for free and then would agree in return to give a certain percentage of his or her income over a minimum wage to repay the college.

And then the college would take all those receivables, this was the Blackstone opportunity, and securitize them.

And, you know, we'd make a lot of money while doing good for society.

Yep.

And we started down that path.

But while we were doing that, a number of HBCUs came to us and said, geez, we really need help with this or help with that.

And so we kind of morphed the idea to much like, and I don't know about Andreessen Horowitz, but much like a private equity portfolio management capability.

We have IT people, we have lean people, we have pricing people, we have on and on and on and on, marketing people.

And

If we could set up a capability like that and then donate them to HBCUs, we could help them a lot.

And HBCUs do remarkable things for...

educationally.

So, 8% of African Americans that go to college go to HBCUs.