Matt Scogin was state runner-up in Sales. Now he is pitching America on a college with no tuition.

In Sales, a student stands up in front of a judge and makes the case for a real product: what it is, who needs it, why they should want it. In 1998 a Portage Northern senior named Matt Scogin was the second-best in Class A in Michigan at it.

He is still pitching. The product now is an idea, and it is a hard sell: that a college can stop charging tuition.

Hope Forward

Scogin is the fourteenth president of Hope College in Holland. In his inaugural address in 2019 he named free tuition as his top goal, and in July 2021 the college launched Hope Forward with a $31.1 million anonymous gift and twenty-two students. The model runs on generosity in place of debt. Donors fund a student’s tuition up front. The student pays nothing and signs a covenant, which is not legally binding, to give back to the college every year after graduation, in whatever amount they choose, so that the students behind them can have the same thing.

Each entering Hope Forward student signs that covenant with the president in person and receives a pin, which they wear again at graduation. By the fall of 2024 there were 120 students in the program from 23 states and 18 countries. This May, 34 of them were part of the largest graduating class in Hope’s history. Scogin has said that nearly all of the first graduates are giving.

Reaching every student this way would take something on the order of a billion dollars, and there are economists who doubt it can be done. Malcolm Gladwell devoted a podcast episode to the experiment. Scogin has described where the idea came from: on a flight descending into New York, looking down from 33,000 feet, he asked himself what number Hope’s tuition ought to be, and the answer he kept arriving at was zero.

Portage

He grew up in Portage in what he calls a modest, middle-class family. His father was a chemist who spent his career at a pharmaceutical company in town, and his mother was a science teacher who later worked in adult education. At his inauguration he thanked his high school social studies teacher, Marshall Rutz, for the hours he had invested in him.

At Portage Northern, Scogin competed in Sales. He reached the last round of Class A Sales that year and finished second.

He has told the story of how he ended up at Hope: he was waitlisted at Michigan, and went to Holland. There he majored in political science and economics, served as president of the student congress, spent a semester in Washington that included a White House internship, found his faith, and met his wife, Sarah. He has said it took him three years to ask her out.

Washington and Wall Street

After Hope he worked for a Michigan state representative, earned a master’s in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and spent a year in Germany as a Robert Bosch Foundation fellow. He was a fiscal adviser to the governor of Massachusetts, and from 2006 to 2008 a senior adviser at the U.S. Treasury, where he received the department’s Exceptional Service Award. He was chief of staff to the chief executive of Wachovia during the 2008 financial crisis, then senior vice president and chief of staff at NYSE Euronext, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, and then chief administrative officer of the investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners. In New York he also served his church as a volunteer finance chief and lay pastor.

Both of his parents died of cancer within a few years of each other, his father at sixty. He has said the losses made him ask what his work was for. He joined Hope’s board in 2016. When the presidency opened, he told the search committee that he did not want to be a college president. He wanted to be Hope’s president. The board elected him in December 2018, when he was thirty-nine, which tied him with the college’s founding president as the youngest ever.

Hope enrolled nearly 3,400 students this fall. On September 17, 2026, Scogin helped hoist the final beam onto a $65 million business building that opens in 2028. Students call him Sco-Daddy.

Scogin’s work at Hope adds another chapter to a Michigan story that includes Portage Northern’s speech team. His interest in making an education possible for others gives that story a generous direction.