Banking Firm That Lost 66 Workers on 9/11 Pays Their Kids' College Tuitions

On September 11, 2001, 66 men and women working at the investment banking firm Sandler O'Neill & Partners on the World Trade Center's 104th floor lost their lives.

In the dreadful days following the terrorist attacks, the company decided to establish a foundation to pay for college tuition for all 76 of its dead colleagues' children.

A view of 9/11

The Sandler O'Neill foundation has already paid college fees for 54 young men and women, with 22 more still eligible. The 54 who are currently or have previously attended college have attended schools ranging from Stanford to Notre Dame to community colleges and technical institutes. Six weeks after September 11, the youngest child eligible was born. When that child graduates from college, the Sandler O'Neill Foundation will no longer exist except in memory, and what a powerful memory it will be. Andy Armstrong was one of the founders of the foundation. Though he did not work for Sandler O’Neill, he was a friend of Sandler’s surviving partner, Jimmy Dunne. He and others of Dunne’s friends and colleagues – as well as banking competitors – helped set up and endow the foundation. “We were up and running by the end of the first week,” Armstrong said. “We wanted the families of the lost to know that we would always remember, that the passing years would never sweep this under the rug. People donated many millions of dollars to set up the foundation. We have no salaries and no expenses except fees to stay extant.”

Present-day Piper Sandler

But why did they do it?

“Because there was a moment in time to stand up,” Dunne said, bluntly. “Because we believed that what we did would echo for a hundred years in the families of our people, their kids, and their grandkids. Because how we conducted ourselves in those first few hours and days would define who we really were and what we were about.” “Because I knew that if we were not honorable, then we stood for nothing. I concluding immediately that we would not be intimidated, we would not go out of business, we will come back stronger than ever, and be an example of people who worked and lived with honor. And that meant taking care of our people and their children with respect and reverence. So we did that.”

20 years on, the firm, now known as Piper Sandler, has two of those children working in their office and following in their father’s footsteps.

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