How the Soros Connection Has Small Bard College Aiming for the $1 Billion Endowment Club The famed financier has a special Holocaust-related bond with the school’s president. Result: Now there’s a shift from the old method that barely kept the junk-rated institution afloat. Billionaire investor George Soros has a decadeslong connection to Bard College. In the 1980s, the school caught the famed financier’s attention when it started a residency program for artists who lived under authoritarian regimes, in nations such as Burma and China. This had a special resonance for Soros, a big-time philanthropist who survived the Holocaust. As a teenager, he eluded the Nazis in his native Hungary and arrived in New York after the war.