Endowed Scholarship Supporting High Achievers
Alumnus Ben Axler, who created a scholarship in his name to benefit students when he was just 34 years old, has created a second Rutgers Business School scholarship named after his company, Spruce Point Capital Management, to support students for years to come.
Rutgers makes high-achieving students work even harder and “sets them up for success,” according to Ben Axler, who graduated with dual degrees in statistics and business marketing in 1999.
The former investment banker turned hedge fund manager, who owns Spruce Point Capital Management, says Rutgers provided him with a great platform to pursue his academic interests: business, statistics, and applied math.
“I felt very strongly that I received an excellent education, support system, and world-class professors who enriched my educational experience,” Axler says. “I feel that Rutgers set me up for success for my future endeavors through graduate school at Yale, and ultimately enabled me to enter the career that I wanted in financial services and set me up for long-term success.”
This inspired the proud alum, who returns regularly to speak to classes at Rutgers Business School, to create the Ben E. Axler Scholarship in 2012. He has, more recently in 2023, replaced that scholarship with a new endowed scholarship. His goal is to support high-achieving students who have a business or economics focus and an affinity for quantitative subjects such as business analytics or statistics.
“I felt like I certainly wanted to establish some legacy and some longer-term strategic thinking and positioning with the scholarship funds so that it could be a multi-year gift that could benefit students over time,” Axler says.
Axler was thrilled to attend the Rutgers University Foundation Celebration of Donor Impact in March, where he met the first recipient of his new scholarship. “I met Efraim Kooijmans, and I thought the committee did a fantastic job in selecting him,” he says. “He’s a bright student with a clearly bright future and will be a good representative of a Spruce Point scholarship.”
Kooijmans RBS’27, who is double-majoring in finance and economics, says, “The scholarship significantly helps alleviate the burden of paying for college and allows students like me to feel more confident and free to pursue our studies.”
Kooijmans enjoyed meeting Axler. “He was very friendly and supportive,” Kooijmans says. “He told me about his career and gave me great advice for succeeding in the world, and answered all my questions with kindness.”
After his planned graduation in May 2027, Kooijmans says he will work full time in New York for Société Générale, a French bank and financial services company.
He is grateful for the scholarship. “The help with tuition is a blessing, but beyond that, it’s the gratitude for the donors and for your own hard work that bring it all together.”
Meeting Kooijmans made Axler feel confident that his scholarship is benefiting the kind of student for whom it was created. “Now, there’s a name and a face to match the scholarship,” Axler says.
It also makes him reflect on his days at Rutgers. Axler says he was “not the most highly recruited student” but was ultimately offered a scholarship and admitted to the Rutgers Honors program. “I think that was a turning point when Rutgers acknowledged me as a student who was excelling and succeeding in the environment.”
He was honored to receive a University Economics Merit Scholarship from George W. Triblehorn Jr. RC’54 when he was a junior and a departmental award in marketing, he says. “It was validation that I was working hard,” Axler said. “It felt good that even at a big university, I could stand out.”
Twenty-seven years after earning his bachelor’s degrees, Axler says he continues to apply what he learned at Rutgers. “Every day, the underdog winning spirit from Rutgers is a part of me,” he says.
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