Supporting Students, One Year at a Time

For Kurt Roeloffs CC’84, the Dean’s Scholarship Reception has become one of the most important events of his year. The annual gathering gives him the chance to meet the student recipients of his Roeloffs Family Scholarship (five so far).

They chat about their lives: where the students are from, how classes are going, outside interests. Roeloffs always makes a point to ask for book recommendations. Among the latest were Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons and Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed — “two of the most important economic critiques of societies exhausting the very resources underpinning their existence,” he says.

The readings “opened my eyes to a new way to consider our human dilemma,” says Roeloffs, an investor and entrepreneur whose scholarship was first awarded in in 2005–06. They also give him insight into the students’ perspectives — what excites or has resonance for them — and “has helped me to continue to be a learner.”

Providing general financial aid to students on a year-by-year basis is the most important thing that alumni can do with their contributions. ... You really are part of the [Columbia] community for the rest of your life.

Roeloffs has requested that, whenever possible, his scholarship be awarded to a female student. It’s his way of honoring his mother, who played a key role in his decision to attend the College. “Her pursuits in poetry, politics and philosophy were all grounded in the [Platonic ideals of beauty, goodness and truth] and remained her passions to the end,” he says. “With that influence from the start, it was almost inevitable that I would find and pick the Core Curriculum and Columbia as my intellectual home.”

Roeloffs thinks that “providing general financial aid to students on a year-by-year basis is the most important thing that alumni can do with their contributions. … You really are part of the [Columbia] community for the rest of your life.”

Roeloffs also gives of his time. He serves on the University Senate, is a member of the Executive Committee of the Columbia College Alumni Association and has interviewed prospective students through the Alumni Representative Committee — a role he undertook because he regretted not having been interviewed himself.

In 2013, Roeloffs, who majored in English at the College and earned an M.B.A. from Penn, founded Protean, a real estate investment firm. He was previously CIO of RREEF Alternative Investments, a division of Deutsche Bank. During his time with Deutsche Bank, he held several posts and lived in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore.

Roeloffs feels he owes that success largely to the Core and his College experience overall, which he credits for his ability to “see other perspectives and navigate them” — an attribute he values as a businessman and a father of four. “It has been good for parenting and for business strategies and negotiations,” he says. “There’s not a part of my life it hasn’t touched.”