to covering all tuition and expenses for the neediest of Brown 's admitted applicants . Hear graduates say how their dreams came true '' For this year 's graduates , tuition and expenses came to a four-year total of about $ 180,000 each . The median annual income of the recipients ' families was $ 18,984 . The gift was the largest single one ever given to Brown and one of the largest ever given for undergraduate scholarships in the United States , according to the school . Reil , a history major who is preparing to co-chair a student conference on U.S.-South Korean relations and aspires to work in politics or foreign service , says the scholarship was the stuff of dreams . He was working up to 40 hours a week during high school so he could pay for clothes and even help with grocery bills . He and his mother were getting by , but the Massachusetts native thought community college or a big state school would be all he could afford . When his academic achievements put Brown in his sights , he thought he 'd have to go into too much debt to go there
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Sidney Frank made millions marketing Jagermeister and other alcohol brands . Three years after his death , he 's a big hit with students at the Ivy League college he briefly attended . Sidney Frank , shown accepting an honorary degree in 2005 , gave $ 100 million to Brown University . He 's a big hit not because of what he sold but because he 's given dozens of them what he could n't afford as a young man : an education at Rhode Island 's Brown University . On Sunday , 49 students from low-income families became the first four-year Sidney E. Frank Scholars to graduate from Brown , owing virtually nothing except gratitude to the late liquor magnate . `` The world of difference that he made for each and every one of us is unbelievable , incredible , '' one of the Frank Scholars , 22-year-old Shane Reil , said Sunday . Frank -- who left Brown after one year in the late 1930s because he could n't afford to stay -- gave the school a $ 100 million endowment in 2004 . He stipulated that the fund 's income go exclusively