It was a pain looking for scholarships when going to college. I had a B average, so I couldn’t get any academic ones. Being a WASP I didn’t qualify for the African-American, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, Catholic, or Greek Orthodox scholarships. Being a very diverse mix of German, French, British, Slovak, and a few other parts I didn’t qualify for the Irish, Indian, Russian or Italian scholarships.
I’m not really trying to rant, just giving some background.
My question is, if I were to someday be very wealthy could I make a scholarship for middle class, “non-minority,” OK-ish grades students? If I could, would I get my ass sued by the NAACP, UNCF, and a bunch of other groups; or could I pull it off since it would just be me and not a company handing out money to whoever they wanted to?
You can make a scholarship for whatever group you want. The only thing that could lead you into tricky waters is if it were so narrowly focused that only one person qualified. Then it would be questionable as to whether it was really a scholarship or just a gift for that person.
You can endow a scholarship for racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, Dorito-eating meth-heads, if you wanted to. As a private organization, you can set whatever criteria you want to choose to whom you dole out money, or none at all.
Of course, some colleges may be a bit wary about accepting tuition money from such a fund, but probably they wouldn’t even notice.
If you’re planning to give the money to a university for them to disperse to a qualified applicant, they may not be happy, just because it’s a pain to administer. (FYI, here’s a New York Times article on restricted scholarships. It includes a couple of examples and mentions that in a few cases, the university has gone to court to loosen the rules.)
A clause stating something like “This scholarship is intended to be awarded on the basis of need to a qualified applicant selected by the university who does not qualify for another scholarship awarded on the basis of academic excellence, anticipated course of study, or minority status” would probably be sufficiently broad to be acceptable and meet the criteria Gedd suggested in the OP.
Quite true. Even if only a small group qualified. Especially if that group had some connection to you. For example, a scholarship fund for “descendants of John Q. Suranyl” – that could be set up, and many schools would willing disburse it. But the IRS would almost certainly consider that a gift to the recipient, so they would have to report it on their taxes, and the IRS would not allow you to deduct it as a charitable contribution to a scholarship fund. And the fund would likely NOT get IRS 501(c)3 charity status.