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Harvard Bound
The Maier Foundation Scholarship
ALICIA ELKIN
For many aspiring and driven West Virginians, college tuition is a financial burden that invokes fear, stress and sometimes even pause when pursuing higher education. To go to a prestigious, Ivy League school like Harvard University can seem financially infeasible, which is exactly why William Joseph Maier, Jr., born and raised in West Virginia, started the Sarah and Pauline Maier Scholarship Foundation in 1958.
“ My grandfather donated half of his assets,” Elizabeth Maier Chernow, Maier’ s granddaughter and board
ExEdge
More than 55 percent of Harvard University’ s undergraduate students receive some type of scholarship.
Source: www. harvard. edu member of the renamed Maier Foundation, Inc.’ s board of directors, says of how the scholarship foundation was established.“ For the most part, this was stock in various companies he had started in order to establish what was then known as the Sarah and Pauline Maier Scholarship Foundation. He named it the scholarship
foundation because he wanted all funds to promote scholarship for needy students in the area.”
As a need-based resource that helps establish funds for students in West Virginia and Ohio who cannot otherwise afford a higher education at Harvard, the scholarship has grown into what is known as the Maier Foundation, Inc., a private, nonprofit corporation that aims to further higher education in West Virginia and empower West Virginians attending colleges and universities out of state.
Maier completed his own education on a full academic scholarship called the Greenleaf Price Scholarship. According to Chernow, her grandfather would not have been able to get an education without that aid.
“ Because he attended Harvard on several academic scholarships, he wanted to give others the same opportunities he received,” says Chernow.
According to John Copenhaver, Jr., a board member for the Maier Foundation, Maier set out to employ the economic principles he had been taught at Harvard and Oxford to accumulate wealth so that, after making ample provision for his family’ s needs, he could devote those riches primarily to the education of others.
To carry on this legacy, the Maier Foundation focuses on establishing need-based scholarship funds at colleges and universities in West Virginia. As of today, the Maier Foundation has given more than
$ 50 million in scholarships and is worth $ 32 million. In 2016 alone, more than $ 3 million was used to name 48 Maier Scholars. In addition to the Sarah and Pauline Maier Scholarship, the Maier Foundation has scholarship endowments at most of the private and public colleges in West Virginia, including West Virginia University, Marshall University, West Virginia State University, the University of Charleston and Wheeling Jesuit University.
“ The scholarships serve as a reminder of what is possible when generosity and
William Joseph Maier, Jr.
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WEST VIRGINIA EXECUTIVE