Hershey profits benefit a boarding school that spends lavishly on its low-income students. But that investment comes with strings attached leaving some students behind and others mired in debt.
by Bob Fernandez, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Charlotte Keith, Spotlight PA ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This article was produced in partnership with Spotlight PA and The Philadelphia Inquirer, which is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. HERSHEY, Pa. .
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
HERSHEY, Pa. When Dayshawn Carroll graduated from the Milton Hershey School in 2011, his goal of college seemed firmly within his grasp. He had lived for six years at the nation’s wealthiest private school, his days tightly scheduled around studying, sports and chores. The school’s manicured campus, about 15 miles from the impoverished Harrisburg neighborhood where he had grown up, was a world apart “like Hogwarts,” he said, referring to the boarding school in the Harry Potter novels.
Photo illustration by ProPublica; source image: Milton Hershey School, MHS 2018 IRS Form 990
Long ago, and to great fanfare, business tycoon Milton Hershey revealed that he had given away his world-famous chocolate company, a gift to the school for poor orphans that he had founded with his wife.
“Well, I have no children that is, no heirs,” he said in 1923. “So I decided to make the orphan boys of the United States my heirs.”
Hershey died in 1945, leaving a huge estate and a company that would grow to sell more than 250 million candy bars a year. His generosity, however, has created a dilemma for the Milton Hershey School that many charities would envy: too much money.