In November 2023, George Mason’s business school became the Donald G. Costello College of Business through the gift of the late Donald Costello, a prominent entrepreneur in Northern Virginia. SSRN spoke with Dean Ajay Vinzé to learn more about the changes in the business school and gain insight into the role of Dean in 2024. Dean Vinzé joined George Mason in 2022, after serving as the Dean of the Trulaske College of Business at the University of Missouri. 

Can you tell us about what attracted you to moving to George Mason? 

George Mason has a unique value proposition in a number of ways. First off, our location, so close to one of the world’s most consequential capital cities, offers an intuitive appeal, with important practical implication for a business school. 

Secondly, George Mason is a relatively young university. We are not quite 50 years old, so in university years, it’s a bit like being a teenager. In a time of profound change, such as right now, that can be an advantage, because sometimes the weight of deep traditions at older universities can work against you. 

A third thing I find very appealing is the way the George Mason mindset suits the post-Covid environment for both students and employers. The way students consume information and knowledge, as well as their expectations of the university, have changed fundamentally. At the same time, employers have developed expectations of a certain immediacy of career readiness displayed by recent graduates.

What we have been doing at Mason is rethinking how we deliver education in the light of these changes. First and foremost, our faculty are engaged with research that is both rigorous and relevant and that appears in the very best scholarly outlets for their disciplines. To be truly impactful, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition. What are needed are the second and third order derivatives of the research, which show up in policy and business practice and thereby make a difference for institutions and the practitioner community. 

In other words, once research is published, you need to convey to both students and employers what the impact of that research is in terms of a career in a particular industry sector. So, research is a big driver in managing both student and employer expectations. In order to move from a university with regional stature to one with national and international stature, research is essential. 

What was the experience of changing the name of the business school like? 

You know, the naming of a college is an interesting exercise by itself. In some respects, it’s a recognition of what you have done in the past, your research program, for example. But it really is the investment of someone who agrees with your vision of the future. 

Mr. Costello was not an alum of ours, but he had been a successful entrepreneur who had taken chances in the establishment of his business at a fairly young age. The way Mason trains its diverse student body in entrepreneurship aligned perfectly with the kind of legacy Mr. Costello wished to establish. The focus is on supporting undergraduate and graduate business students to prepare for successful careers as entrepreneurs. 

How do you approach the role of Dean in today’s environment?

I think the role of Deans has been changing in business schools. There has been a lot of discussion about rankings recently, but just chasing the metrics is the wrong approach. If you do the right things, the metrics will follow. That has been our approach. 

Fundraising and development work is certainly an important part of my job. That’s about 60% of my time. Going out into the community and letting people know what the Business School is doing, how it can serve them, how we can collaborate with them. This requires having an understanding of the latest research that faculty are producing, but also being able to translate its meaning to a non-specialist audience. Additionally, we have established a relationship with just about every Chamber of Commerce and EDA in the Northern Virginia region and more broadly in the DMV. 

It’s important for business schools to understand the local realities that surround them. If you look at the Bay Area for example, business schools there will miss the mark if they don’t respond to the surrounding environment of high-tech and start up business. For Mason, the largest industry in our area is government contracting. It’s an $800 billion industry. One in three of our graduates go into that industry. We have responded, and at CCB we feature the only academic research center in the country focused on this important sector – our Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting.

My value proposition to CEOs in this area is: Students come here; they get a great education and stay. They are your workforce of the future.

How has the curriculum at George Mason changed to meet the expectations of students and employers?

What makes higher education unique is that society has given us the responsibility to provide credentials. Many companies can certainly offer certificate programs and badging, and various kinds of micro-credentialing, but they don’t give people degrees. Because higher education has that responsibility, you have to make sure you are actually giving degrees that are relevant and meaningful to society and are grounded with rigorous research. 

One of the unique things that we’ve done here in the Business School is implement this notion of stackable certificates. So instead of saying, “I’m doing a degree in accounting,” which could mean I’m a cost account or a financial accountant, we have created targeted programs in specific sub-disciplines such as forensic accounting and fraud analysis. While we do the standard degree in accounting, this is an innovation that provides expertise in a focused area over five or six intensive courses. If you are not doing a computer science degree, but are interested in cybersecurity sales as a career, there is no degree like that. But we have just created a Master of Science in Management that allows you to customize your experience through these certificates, and when you put them together, you get credentialed with a degree. 

We live in a society where business is central. If you say, “I’m a farmer,” that’s not quite right. You’re actually a businessperson in agriculture. A physician is a businessperson in healthcare. If you’re a journalist, you’re a businessperson in mass media. But it’s equally important for business to relate to all these. And that relationship is what we are demonstrating through the curricular changes we have implemented. 

I mentioned the importance of the government contracting industry earlier. We have responded to this by creating the first dedicated research center in the country, which has also been named recently: the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting. We also have a minor in government contracting. Real estate is another important industry in our area, so we have a center focused on research in real estate and entrepreneurship that offers a master’s degree.  

What direction would you give to an undergraduate contemplating going to business school?

Business schools in many ways are life lessons. We live in a capitalist society. We live in an economic system that is based on business in many ways, regardless of your specialty or base discipline. Business schools are always going to add an extra dimension. So regardless of whether you take that as your first graduate degree or later, I would always advise people at some point in time to make sure to get part of your education in a Business School. 

Regardless of what you do, at some point in time, you’re going to have to lean on business education. So, whether you do it right off the bat, or you do it later, it needs to happen. I think the days when you can just rely on learning on the job things like supply chain management and logistics, those are probably over.

I’ll give you an example, and this is very personal. For a long time, I told both my kids to go to business school at some point. Neither of them did, so I was thinking, “Good Lord! What am I doing as a father? I can’t even convince my own children.”  So, my daughter is trained in public health, and she’s worked and lived all over the world. A few years back, she came to me and she said, “Dad, you know, I have a problem. You know, in public health I’m managing a lot of projects, and a lot of money flows into them, but I don’t know the basics of budgeting or project management or logistics or purchasing or acquisition. These are things I need to learn.”

I asked my daughter after she finished her MBA, “Well, what did you think of Business School?” And she said, “It’s Life 101.”