Tjuan Dogan has a simple request for the endowed scholarship she has funded at the USC College of Education — invest in the next generation of educators, like the ones who helped her find her own path and passion.
“At USC I had some incredible teachers and mentors who helped to shape my leadership capacity and my interest in the world, and who put me on a great career path,” Dogan says. “In short, I want to give that back to the university. I want to invest in other dream makers.
“I think it’s an honor to invest in a dream. But for me, when you invest in a teacher, you’re investing in a dream maker.”
Dogan, a native of Greenville, was pursuing a master’s in education — and meanwhile working as a graduate assistant for College of Education professor Aretha Pigford — when a door opened.
Pigford was at that time developing USC’s African American Professors Program, which provides scholarships and helps prepare underrepresented, ethnically diverse students to become professors. Now known as the Grace Jordan McFadden Professors Program, it has helped more than 80 doctoral and MFA candidates pursue their dreams since 1997.
Dogan, who earned a bachelor’s in advertising in 1991, joined the program’s inaugural cohort.
“The professors program allowed me to earn my Ph.D. with my tuition fully funded,” she says. “It was an incredible opportunity that helped decrease financial barriers and allowed me to pursue my doctorate full time.”
Armed with her Ph.D. from USC in 2002, Dogan completed a yearlong fellowship at Harvard Business School. She then headed to Atlanta and has held positions in philanthropy and social responsibility with the Southern Education Foundation, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation, the IBM Foundation and Emory University.
She now works as global director of social impact at Coursera, a platform for online learning and career development. Coursera works with universities and companies around the world to offer online classes, certificates and degree programs to nontraditional students.
For Dogan, education is a lifelong pursuit. Twenty years after completing her doctorate, she went back to school — the seminary this time — and earned a master’s in religion and public life from Candler School of Theology at Emory.
“The Gospel of Luke shares that to whom much is given, much is required,” she says. “I have been incredibly blessed to advise and work with investors, corporations and foundations on how to support education programs around the globe. I do that in my job. And so, I’m grateful that I’m at a point in my career where I can advise myself on doing the same.”
She’s been a consistent donor throughout her career and is now ready — and able — to create a scholarship at the College of Education. The Dr. Tjuan Dogan College of Education Endowed Scholarship is designed to invest in future educators, the people who will help encourage, inspire and support the dreams of the next generation.
Education, she believes, is the great equalizer — and exposure to education offers people the opportunity to make the world a better place. It’s something she learned at home, where her mother, grandmother and other family members were educators; her mother also earned her graduate degree from the USC College of Education.
“While the scholarship bears my name, it’s also for my family who supported me and those educators who made a difference in my life and in so many other people’s lives,” she says. “It brings me a lot of pride and joy to be in a position to do this.”
Dogan was one of 18 Black women alumni whose contributions to the university were honored with a brick on the historic Horseshoe in 2023. Her brick lists her name and degrees, but she also requested it include another word: persevere.
“The scholarship is my way of saying to any of those students, ‘persevere,’ just like I had to and just like other people encouraged me to,” she says. “Creating the scholarship is an opportunity to not only say ‘persevere,’ but to really show students that I want to help them pursue their dreams and persevere.”