Rags-To-Riches Billionaire David Walentas To Donate $100 Million To University Of Virginia, Helping First-Generation Students

When David Walentas finished his Navy ROTC application test in 1955, he had to choose one of about 50 schools he would want to attend. Going to college “wasn’t anything we even talked about,” he recalls, and to better his odds of getting accepted, he picked a school he thought nobody had heard of—at the end of the alphabetical list.

Six decades later, the real estate multibillionaire is sending the University of Virginia, his alma mater twice over, a nine-digit thank you. UVA announced Saturday that Walentas, No. 342 on The Forbes 400, will donate $100 million to the Charlottesville-based public university. 

Fittingly, most of the money—which Walentas says will be paid out over five to ten years— will help the school fund opportunities for first-generation college students like Walentas, who is now worth an estimated $2.5 billion. Half of the funds will help establish scholarships for undergraduates who are the first in their family to attend college and who hail from three places: the state of Virginia; Walentas’ hometown of Rochester, New York; or his current home, New York City. Another $25 million will create fellowships at UVA’s Darden School of Business for first generation college grads looking to get an M.B.A. The rest will go toward other professorships and fellowships. 

“I cannot imagine a better way to honor the future than by making a significant and lasting commitment to first-generation college students,” University of Virginia President James E. Ryan said in a statement. “This gift from David Walentas will serve as a cornerstone of the $5 billion campaign we are launching this weekend and will have an enduring impact on the University of Virginia and on those who attend it.”

The donation is Walentas’ largest philanthropic action to date, but it’s not his first gift to his alma mater. His Walentas Foundation in 2013 donated $5,000 to its Darden School of Business, where Walentas got his M.B.A. after finishing his undergraduate degree at the university. He says he and his wife have also given “a few million” to the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, which provides merit scholarships to UVA students.

Walentas, who earlier this month received a 2 (out of 5) for his Forbes 400 philanthropy score, has focused much of his giving on education. Between 2013 and 2017 (the most recent public file available), he moved $8.1 million into his foundation, which has in turn made grants to organizations including New York City’s Fund for Public Schools and Success Academy Charter Schools. The foundation has also donated at least $128,000 to the University of Pennsylvania, which his son Jed attended.

“Education to me is the great equalizer,” says Walentas, 81, in an interview. “Most people don’t really care where you come from, whether you talk funny or look funny. It’s, ‘What do you know?’ and ‘What can we do together?’” 

A college education was an important launching pad for Walentas, who grew up in poverty. His father suffered a paralyzing stroke when Walentas was five; by the next year, Walentas says he was “milking cows and shoveling s—t for my room and board.” His big break came in the form of the four-year ROTC scholarship to UVA, but he fumbled that away after  “a clandestine visit to a nearby all-girls school,” according to a 2014 Forbes profile of Walentas.

Walentas, distraught at the time, now seems pretty pleased with how things turned out.

“I went home and worked for a year, got another scholarship, and I didn’t have to go in the Navy, and I never got drafted,” the billionaire recalls. “Sometimes the thing you think that’s the worst for you ends up being the best.”

He later cofounded real estate developer Two Trees Management. Walentas borrowed $12 million in the late 1970’s to buy 2 million square feet of old buildings in Brooklyn’s rundown Dumbo neighborhood, which he’s turned into one of the borough’s hottest hubs. With his son Jed, now Two Trees’ CEO, Walentas is once again building a Brooklyn luxury spot, this time near Williamsburg’s Domino Sugar Factory. In September, his nascent neighborhood opened its second tower, a 45-story office and apartment building.

Walentas is one of five members of The Forbes 400 with a degree from the University of Virginia, which ranked No. 33 on the 2019 list of Forbes’ Top Colleges. The richest is Paul Tudor Jones, worth $5 billion, who also earned his bachelor’s degree at UVA.

Walentas’ gift, while very large, is not UVA’s biggest windfall this year. That title belongs to Jaffray Woodriff, the CEO of $3.3 billion hedge fund Quantitative Investment Management, who said in January he would give the university $120 million to establish a data science school.