All You Need to Know About Mellody Hobson

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Mellody Hobson was born on April 3, 1969, in Chicago, Illinois. Mellody has five older siblings and attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory. After graduat ing in 1987, Hobson attended Princeton University, where she joined the Cottage Club, one of several eating clubs on campus. She graduated from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1991, and in 2019, the school honored her with the Woodrow Wilson Award during Alumni Day. In 2020, Mellody and the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation gave cash to Princeton to “establish a new residential college at Princeton University.”

The residential college will be named Hobson College and will be built on the location of what was previously known as Wilson College. In June 2020, Princeton’s Board of Trustees agreed to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from campus buildings owing to his “racist views and policies.” Mellody described her time at Princeton as follows: “No one in my family had graduated from college when I arrived from Chicago, but even as I looked up at buildings named after Rockefeller and Forbes, I felt at home.” I hope that my name will serve as a reminder to future generations of kids, particularly those who are Black and brown and the ‘firsts’ in their families, that they, too, belong.

In 2017, she became the first African-American woman to serve as chair of The Economic Club of Chicago. Hobson has been a financial contributor on “Good Morning America” and “CBS This Morning,” as well as the host and executive producer of the 2009 ABC special “Un-Broke: What You Need to Know About Money.” Mellody has been named to “Ebony” magazine’s “20 Leaders of the Future” list (1992), “Esquire” magazine’s “America’s Best and Brightest” list (2002), the “Wall Street Journal’s” “50 Women to Watch” list (2004), and “Time” magazine’s list of “The World’s 100 Most Influential People” (2015).