On March 21, the roughly 70 employees of the Schuler Education Foundation, based in the affluent suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, were summoned to an emergency all-hands meeting. Over the past two-plus decades, the nonprofit founded and funded by a former president of healthcare giant Abbott Laboratories, Jack Schuler, had spent at least $150 million counseling and tutoring more than 1,800 low-income students from Chicago and Milwaukee-area high schools to help them gain admission to elite colleges; those colleges in turn covered most (if not all) of the students’ tuition and other costs.

The employees, who first had to certify they wouldn’t record anything, were let into a Zoom room where the nonprofit’s executive director Joanne Bertsch read from a script announcing that the foundation would shut down on May 24. Everyone would be let go except for a skeleton crew of seven college counselors left to support students through August.

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