Grove City College Gave Business School Namesake a Shot
GROVE CITY, Pa. – Grove City College gave Howard E. Winklevoss a shot.
That was all the teenager from Mercer, Pa., needed to embark on a journey that led to a successful career in the field of business technology and came full circle last week when the college honored Winklevoss by adding the 1965 alumnus’ family name to the college’s business school.
The new Winklevoss School of Business is being supported in part by a $4 million Bitcoin gift from its namesake. It was the first digital currency donation in the college’s history.
During a ceremony celebrating the naming, Winklevoss shared his Grove City College story, which began about 60 years ago with a trip to Penn State, where Winklevoss intended to enroll after high school. His poor grades, largely due to him putting his time, effort and ingenuity into restoring a 1932 Model A Ford hot rod, were a problem.
“They looked at my transcript and said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘But I built a hot rod from the ground up,’” Winklevoss said. “They said, ‘We don’t have a major in hot rods.’” Looking for an alternative, he went down the road from his hometown to Grove City College, where his application was accepted. “I said, ‘Have you looked at my transcript?’ They said, ‘Yeah, but you built a car … maybe you’ll build something else.’ And I did,” he recalled.
Winklevoss said his entrepreneurial spirit was fostered at the college. He was inspired by the courses taught by Hans Sennholz, a protégé of Ludwig von Mises and a leading voice for Austrian economics. “I fell in love with freedom, capitalism and everything the Austrian school is about,” he said. He put those lessons to work to pay his way through school. Winklevoss and a roommate turned a part-time job selling pots and pans door-to-door into a mini cookware empire that he said earned him more money than his professors made.
At Grove City College, he earned a degree in accounting and met his wife, Carol, before graduate school and a decade in academia that included serving as professor of actuarial science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His groundbreaking book “Pension Mathematics with Numerical Illustrations” revolutionized the industry and led him to found multiple ventures, including Winklevoss Consultants, a financial consultant to over 125 major corporations, and Winklevoss Technologies, a company that builds software for the actuarial consulting community to model and administer defined benefit pension plans. Winklevoss Technologies was acquired by Constellation Software for $125 million in 2023.
In recent years, Winklevoss has become a Bitcoin advocate. The digital currency is the answer, he said, to a longtime Austrian school problem: money. Bitcoin, he said, is solid money that is independent of government. “It is the future of money,” he said. “It gives me great pleasure to donate the world’s soundest money to the school that first taught me about these concepts 60 years ago.”
Grove City College, he said, stands in contrast to other higher education institutions and is poised to play a significant role in the future. “We don’t have to make Grove City College great again. It already is,” Winklevoss said. “I think the world of this college. Not what it has done, but what it can do.”
Winklevoss’ twin sons, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, spoke about their father’s affinity for the college and how the ideals and values learned amid the pines shaped their family and their understanding of economics, which they both studied at Harvard.
The Winklevoss twins, who founded the digital currency exchange Gemini, said their father’s story demonstrates the value that the college places on students as people, not just transcripts.
“Grove City College is a special place for individual learners. It is a bastion of independent thought,” Tyler Winklevoss said.
“This school gave our father a shot,” Cameron Winklevoss said. “It saw something in our father.”
The Winklevoss School of Business offers 15 majors in accounting and finance, management and marketing, entrepreneurship and the college’s distinctive Austrian School Department of Economics, along with master’s degree programs including Master of Business Administration, Master of Science in accounting, Master of Science in business analytics, Master of Arts in economics and more than 20 minors.
It was established in 2022 under the college’s strategic plan, which calls for optimizing academic structures and reviewing and reimagining the curriculum in areas where the college’s strengths and resources meet market needs.
“Grove City College played a pivotal role in shaping my career and success and has always been a champion of free enterprise and independence,” Winklevoss said. “This gift is a way to give back to an institution that has given me so much. I hope it will inspire future generations of students to pursue excellence and make a positive impact in the world.”
Pictured at top: Howard E. Winklevoss, center, and his sons, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, hold up coins commemorating the naming of the Winklevoss School of Business at Grove City College. Winklevoss’ $4 million Bitcoin donation to the college was its first digital currency gift.
Published by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
