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The Lewis Mandell Memorial Fund for Students of Economics

The Lewis Mandell Memorial Fund for Students of Economics was established in tribute to Lewis Mandell (1943-2019), a 1964 graduate of City College of New York who credited CCNY, and specifically the Economics Department, with giving him the strong foundation from which he launched an extraordinary academic career that spanned more than four decades. 

Throughout his life, Lew helped countless students to achieve academic success and a chance to pursue their dreams. In gratitude to CCNY and the Economics Department, Lew’s wish was to assist today’s CCNY students in the pursuit of their futures by creating an endowment to assist undergraduate economics majors with their most urgent financial needs.

Lewis Mandell was an exceptional person with the breadth of knowledge and the curiosity of a Renaissance Man. He was an academic, a writer, a pilot, an inventor, an innovator, a life-long tennis player, and a world traveler. He had a great sense of humor. And perhaps most important, he was always a kind and considerate person. 

Lew was an outstanding teacher, specializing in investments and valuation at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He won countless teaching awards over the years, including the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2008.
Lew is well known as one of the founding fathers of financial literacy research. Part of his work included his creation of MoneySKILL, a free, interactive online financial education curriculum. By 2019, MoneySKILL had reached more than one million users in the United States and in forty countries. As a result of his financial literacy research and work, he received the William E. Odem Visionary Leadership Award, the nation’s leading award in financial literacy.

During Lew’s career, he held professorships at a number of leading universities and served as Dean of Business at Marquette University and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He taught in MBA programs and banking programs in China, India, Singapore, Israel, and Kuwait. He was the author of 22 books and numerous scholarly articles. He spoke nationally and internationally on consumer and investor financial literacy and education; hosted radio call-in programs on investments and entrepreneurship in two major radio markets; and served as an outside director of a publicly-traded corporation. He testified before Congress four times and was a guest on numerous nationally-broadcast television and radio programs. In addition to his scholarly articles, he was published in The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, and The Economist, to name just a few.

Lew cared deeply for his students, and devoted his career to helping and guiding them. Many of Lew’s students continued to talk with Lew, write to Lew, and visit Lew long after their graduations. So great was the devotion he inspired, that on Mother’s Day a year after Lew’s passing, a group of past students who are now professionals on Wall Street designated a spokesperson to call Lew’s wife to wish her a happy Mother’s Day from all of them, and to tell her, yet again, how much they missed Lew’s caring and guidance.

This Endowment is a tribute to Lew’s lifelong devotion to students and his abiding gratitude to the Economics Department and to City College of New York.