In 1981, Jeff Thomasson earned his MBA from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, which is regularly ranked among the top programs. That launched him on the path to building his own wealth management firm, which now has more than $38 billion in assets under advisement.
Now, he’s giving back to the school that made him. Last week, IU announced Thomasson and his wife, Cheryl, had donated $100 million toward graduate education at Kelley. The gift will also go toward supporting IU’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and is the largest from an individual in IU history. In total, the Thomassons have donated more than $111 million to the school, and the board of trustees has approved naming the Kelley School’s graduate division after Thomasson.
“The Kelley MBA program set the foundation for my career, and this gift is our way of paying forward the investment people made in us,” Thomasson said in a statement. “We hope it encourages others to do the same, creating opportunities that will ripple across generations.”
How Jeff Thomasson built Oxford Financial Advisors
After earning his MBA from IU, where he specialized in investments and taxation, Thomasson founded Oxford Financial Advisors, a regularly top-ranked registered investment advisor (RIA) firm. The firm essentially began as a class assignment: Thomasson took the master’s essay he’d written on an ideal wealth management firm and turned it into a blueprint for his own company, he told Forbes in 2011.
Thomasson also came from a humble background, and the odds were stacked against him when he first established his firm. His father was a construction worker, was disabled in an accident, and died while Thomasson was in college—and his mother was a bank teller. A local oil distributor who had employed Thomasson since his teens actually paid for his college education, according to Forbes. He launched his firm at age 23 with $20,000 in grad school debt during a high-interest, high-unemployment economy in the early 1980s. Forbes reported that he grew his client base largely through cold calling, holding roughly 1,000 meetings per year and working six days a week.
At the time, Oxford Financial’s move to a fee-only model was pretty unconventional. His firm did that instead of collecting commissions, though fees are now an industry standard. Now the Indianapolis-based firm is one of the largest independent RIAs in the country, with more than $38 billion in assets under advisement, 25 managing directors across seven offices, and more than 700 family and institutional clients.
Betting on business education
The Thomassons’ gift comes at a moment when philanthropic donations toward higher education are both booming and under scrutiny. Philanthropic donations to education (mostly colleges and universities) hit an all-time high of roughly $92 billion in 2025, which was faster than any other category, according to a Giving USA report.
Yet meanwhile, dollars are pouring in as public faith in higher education wavers. Just 38% of Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, according to a July Gallup poll. That’s down from 57% when the firm began tracking the question in 2015. Main concerns cited include rising costs, doubts about return on investment, and the rise of AI in education, the poll shows.
And especially since the emergence of AI, the return on investment of an MBA has been called into question. Some executives say it’s not necessary, while others say it’s what made them. While Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has argued corporate America has too many MBAs running it, others like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have praised the programs, saying it granted him the “knowledge and confidence to tackle complex questions at the intersection of business and technology.” Nadella earned his MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
That tension is what makes a major gift to graduate school so notable. Meanwhile, other philanthropists, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and MacKenzie Scott, have funneled their fortunes into higher education. Interestingly, the Thomassons’ gift will also support the future of giving through a donation to IU’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy—the institution that researches and writes the Giving USA report documenting the giving boom that includes this donation.