Grove City College gave Howard E. Winklevoss ’65 a shot.
That was all the teenager from Mercer, Pa., needed to embark on a journey of success that led to a successful career in the field of business technology and came full circle Thursday when the College honored Winklevoss by adding the alumnus’ family name to the College’s business school.
The newly minted 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 60 some 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 Dr. 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 (Leonard ’65) 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 because of what it has done, but what it can do.”
Winklevoss’ twin sons, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, spoke about their father’s affinity for Grove City College and how the ideals and values learned ‘mid the pines shaped their family and their understanding of economics, which they both studied at Harvard. The 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.
Programs in Accounting, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Management, Marketing, International Business, Business Analysis, Business Statistics, Human Resource Management, Supply Chain Management, Business Economics, and Economics prepare students to face the challenges of careers in an ever-more complex world with the knowledge, experience, and vision to become effective and ethical leaders in Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, reputable organizations, or even their own startups.
In addition to the School’s disciplinary accreditation through the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP), highly accomplished faculty mentors, multiple interdisciplinary opportunities, and diverse internship experiences, students in the Winklevoss School can connect with the award-winning Center for Entrepreneurship + Innovation at Grove City College, which provides a unique experiential component through programming, competition, and events designed to prepare students for success in any field.
Business education has been a staple of the College’s curriculum since its founding in 1876. Many alumni have made their mark in the business world and projected Grove City College’s influence in the marketplace.
They include towering 20th century figures such as J. Howard Pew, class of 1900, who built Sun Oil into an industry behemoth and used his vast wealth to support countless philanthropic endeavors, and J. Paul Sticht, class of 1939, a legendary chief executive who led TWA, Campbells Soup, Federated Department Stores, and RJR and, over the course of his career, helped create the international corporation, and others, like Howard Winklevoss, who continue to transform the marketplace.
“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.”