Research from professors Bruce Carlin and Tarik Umar finds that allowing financial professionals to flag suspicious activity and delay risky transactions reduces elder financial exploitation.

Elder financial abuse is a growing and often underreported threat, rooted in the intersection of aging, cognitive decline and concentrated wealth. More often than not, the perpetrators are not strangers but trusted caregivers, friends and family members.

To address the vulnerability for seniors, the Model Act to Protect Vulnerable Adults from Financial Exploitation (2016) gave financial professionals permission to report suspicious activity and pause questionable transactions.

Has the Model Act made a difference? Can a flag or wire transfer delay actually deter elder financial abuse? Professors Carlin and Umar discuss their findings:

What did the Model Act change for financial professionals, and why did that matter?

Carlin: Before the Model Act, financial professionals could notice that something seemed off, but they often had very little room to respond. A client might appear confused, pressured or unusually eager to move money, yet privacy rules made it difficult to step in without risking overreach.

The Model Act changed that by giving advisers and broker-dealers permission to report suspected exploitation, place a temporary hold on a suspicious disbursement and contact a trusted person designated by the client. That may sound like a small legal change, but in practice it was significant. In cases like these, timing matters. Once the money leaves the account, it can be very hard to recover.

Umar: And what matters is that the law did not require financial professionals to act. It allowed them to act. A permissive policy lowers the barrier to intervention without turning every questionable transaction into a compliance exercise. It gives advisers legal cover to use their judgment when they see red flags. In that sense, the Model Act created an early-warning system. Sometimes the most effective intervention is just a minor delay, or a call to a trusted contact, or simply an extra layer of scrutiny.

How did you study whether those new protections were actually reducing elder financial abuse? What did the data show?

Carlin: We wanted to know whether this legal change had a measurable effect, so we looked across all 50 states from 2014 to 2020 and compared states that adopted provisions of the Model Act with states that did not.

To do that, we used two main sources of evidence: reports filed with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, and state-level crime data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System. That gave us a way to study the policy from more than one angle. Rather than relying on anecdotes, we could look for broad patterns in both reporting behavior and actual incidents of exploitation.

Umar: The data showed this was not just a symbolic policy. In states that adopted the Model Act, elder financial exploitation fell by about 15% relative to the average level of abuse.

We also found that the effect was strongest in places with a higher concentration of financial professionals, especially in counties with more presence from large bank holding companies. The results were strongest where there were more people in a position to notice suspicious behavior and act on it. In other words, once professionals were given the legal room to intervene, many of them did, and the decline in exploitation was meaningful.

Why did a policy without a mandate still work, and where else could this kind of approach help protect vulnerable people?

Umar: We think it worked because it changed the timing of intervention. The law gave financial professionals a chance to act before the damage was done, not after. If an adviser can pause a suspicious transaction, or contact a trusted person, that can be enough to stop exploitation before funds leave the account.

Carlin: There is also a deterrent effect. Once people know those protections are in place, they may be less likely to attempt something improper in the first place.

Just as important, we found no evidence that financial professionals abused this authority. Customer complaints did not rise, and regulatory actions against advisers did not increase in states that adopted the law. That suggests the policy created a useful safeguard without creating a new problem.

Umar: That is what makes this finding so encouraging. The policy did not rely on a new mandate, a new penalty or a heavy enforcement regime. It simply gave professionals permission to use their judgment. More broadly, it points to a model that could apply in other settings where vulnerable people depend on expert intermediaries, including healthcare, law and social work.

Carlin: Yes, one lesson from this research is that a well-designed policy does not always need to force action. Sometimes giving people clear legal cover to step in responsibly is what makes meaningful intervention possible.

Read more on Rice Business Wisdom

A lot of people are feeling anxiety about AI. You’ve written about how this isn’t the first time education has gone through a shift like this. How do you think about that history as you’re teaching in the finance classroom?

It’s worth remembering that every major technology has created classroom anxiety. When calculators came out, people worried students would never learn math. When Excel showed up, there was panic about students losing the ability to compute by hand. Socrates famously worried that writing would “produce forgetfulness” and create “the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.”

Generative AI fits into a very old pattern. The tools change, but the core concepts don’t. Students still need to understand finance. They still need to interpret results, question assumptions and think critically.

What changes is how much time we spend on the mechanics. We don’t teach square roots by hand anymore, and that didn’t hurt anybody’s understanding of math. AI is simply another step in that direction.

You started trying AI tools with students early on. Where did that interest begin?

Honestly, it started with realizing how much we were still forcing into Excel because it was the tool we had. Spreadsheets are perfect for pro formas and discounted cash flows, but they’ve never been great for a lot of the other analyses people in industry now handle with more powerful tools.

Once the AI models became good enough to write and run code, the barrier disappeared for students who don’t know how to program. Suddenly, students could use the same kinds of tools professionals rely on without being programmers. That’s what pulled me in.

As the tools have improved, my teaching has shifted naturally from showing students what AI can accomplish to having them build with it: apps, workflows, automations, etc.

What does AI-enabled teaching look like when you’re in front of students?

The biggest shift is that we treat AI as the interface. Instead of opening Excel or searching through menus, students “chat” with the model. They tell it to pull data, sort stocks or run regressions — and the model writes the code and executes it.

I’ve even built what are essentially “skills” for the model — prompts that tell it exactly how to perform certain finance tasks — so students can say, “Use your skill,” and it knows what to do.

The goal isn’t to turn students into coders. Instead, they’re designing workflows, checking results and iterating with the model until the analysis is correct.

When students first work with these tools, what jumps out at them?

The first thing that hits them is just how much AI can do. Most of our students have never programmed, so watching the model generate code feels almost unreal. But then they hit the other side. They’ll ask the model to do something, and it gives an answer that doesn’t make sense.

My classes help them shift their mindset. You have to chat with the tool like a colleague until you get the result you want. Once they get past that, it gets exciting. Things they once struggled to build in spreadsheets can be automated with a simple prompt. I had a student say, “I’ve never programmed before, and now I can build apps.” Moments like that tell you it’s working.

How closely does that classroom work track with what finance firms are doing right now?

Pretty closely. Firms are trying to automate the exact same things students practice — the repetitive analyses and formatting that eat up so much time for junior analysts.

What firms really need are people who understand finance and can also work with AI to build simple, customized tools. In some ways, the classroom is actually ahead of the curve, because students can experiment without the constraints firms face in production.

Read more on Rice Business Wisdom

As I wrap up nearly 25 years leading the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, I’ve found myself reflecting on a career path I never could have predicted.

I didn’t set out to work in startups or to help build an entrepreneurial ecosystem. I began in a much more traditional place — as an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, joining Exxon (now ExxonMobil) and moving to Houston in part to escape Chicago winters.

Exxon was an extraordinary training ground. I moved across roles that offered a full view of how a business operates — from financial planning to operations to sales. It was structured, rigorous and deeply practical. But after 15 years, I felt the pull toward something less defined. I stepped into consulting, joining a large firm as a principal, thinking it might help me figure out what came next.

The real shift, though, started on a flight to Paris in the mid-1990s. The internet was just beginning to take shape, and I remember thinking, simply, I want to be part of that.

In 1998, I got my chance. I joined a startup called Viant, moving from a billion-dollar corporation to a company with $20 million in revenue and a lot of ambition. It was my first real career risk. I told myself that even if it didn’t work out, I would figure out the next step.

For a time, it worked. Viant went public in 1999 and grew quickly. I opened the Houston office, signed a 20,000-square-foot lease downtown and built a team of 40. We were helping companies like Compaq and Enron develop their early web platforms — and for a moment, it felt like we were building the future in real time.

And then, just as quickly, it shifted. The dot-com bust arrived in 2001. I had turned on the lights in our office the year before; now I was turning them off.

Like many people at that moment, I expected to take time to reset. Instead, an unexpected opportunity appeared. That same summer, Rice Business was looking for someone to lead the newly launched Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship. I had encountered the Alliance as a sponsor and judge at its first business plan competition. It seemed interesting — meaningful, even. I told myself I would do it for a few years.

Nearly 25 years later, I’m still here.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that I was stepping into work that would feel both deeply personal and endlessly energizing. The Alliance wasn’t just about startups; it was about people — founders willing to take risks on ideas that might or might not work.

Over time, that became the throughline.

I’ve had the privilege of watching founders — students and alumni alike — move from early ideas to real companies. I’ve seen them gain the confidence, mentorship and networks they need to keep going, even when the path isn’t clear. There is something uniquely satisfying about being part of that moment when someone decides to build.

At the same time, I’ve watched Houston evolve. When we began, the idea that the city could become a center for technology entrepreneurship felt aspirational. Today, that ecosystem is real and growing — shaped by collaborations between startups, investors and major companies searching for new solutions.

If there is a single expression of that growth, it’s the Rice Business Plan Competition. In 2001, nine teams competed for $10,000. Today, 42 of the top student startups from around the world compete for more than $1 million. But the scale tells only part of the story. What matters most is the community around it — hundreds of investors and mentors who show up each year not just to judge, but to advise, connect and support. For many, it has become a highlight of the year.

Along the way, Rice Business itself has changed. When we started, it wasn’t ranked in entrepreneurship. Today, it is consistently recognized among the best — a reflection of a sustained commitment to building something distinctive.

What I carry with me most, though, are the lessons. The value of passion and vision. The importance of building a team that believes in the work and in each other. The power of momentum — how small successes, over time, become something much larger. And perhaps most of all, the importance of listening — to founders, to partners, to the people you serve — because they will tell you how to improve, if you’re willing to hear it.

Looking back, what strikes me is how little of this was planned. The career I imagined is not the one I ended up with. And yet, in many ways, it has been far more meaningful.

What began as a short-term decision became a long bet — on people, on ideas and on the possibility of building something that lasts.

Check out our podcast interview with Brad Burke:

Rice has long known that big ideas don’t just happen — they need a place to grow. The Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) is the home of entrepreneurship and innovation education at Rice — and it just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. To honor every year of that entrepreneurial spirit, here are 10 things everyone should know about Lilie Lab.

Here’s to the next decade of impact!

$16.5 million
Founding gift from the Frank and Cindy Liu Family Foundation that established Lilie.

2015-2016 academic year
The year Lilie launched to centralize entrepreneurship education at Rice.

1,600+ undergrad and grad students annually
Participate in Lilie programs, workshops and courses each year.

4,000 square feet
Dedicated co-working space to support students’ entrepreneurial ambitions.

All majors represented
Students from across Rice — engineering to business to humanities — participate.

60+ mentors and advisers
Founders, investors and alumni working directly with students.

$250,000+ in annual student funding
Distributed through grants and competitions, including the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge, Innovation Fellows, and the Summer Venture Studio — all equity-free.

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150+
Student-led startups actively supported at any given time.

300+ 
Ventures that have emerged from Lilie since its founding.

#1
Rice Business’ ranking for best graduate school for entrepreneurship from The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine — the 7th year running — supported by Lilie Lab and Rice’s broader entrepreneurial ecosystem, which also includes the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and the Rice Business Plan Competition.

Check out our podcast interview with Professor Yael Hochberg, head of Lilie Lab: 

Here’s what current students in our undergraduate, MAcc, Hybrid MBA, MBA@Rice and Ph.D. programs are learning, listening to and taking away from their time at Rice Business. Check out the fall 2025 issue to hear from students in the Full-Time, Executive and Professional MBA programs.

Diana Jue-Rajasingh has been in her McNair Hall office for only three years, since she joined Rice Business as an assistant professor of strategic management, but she uses it to tell a much longer story. “I try to fill my office with things that are from my journey,” she says, gesturing toward the objects and photos that trace the questions that have shaped her work.

Those questions have stayed remarkably consistent. Since her undergraduate and master’s work at MIT, and later in the academic path that brought her to Rice from a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Jue-Rajasingh has been interested in a deceptively simple problem: how life-improving products actually make their way to the people they are meant to serve. She describes it as a question of systems, organizations and reaching the “last mile,” a challenge she sees as both essential and overlooked.

One photo in her office helps crystallize that concern: an image she took in South India of clean cook stoves sitting unused in a storehouse, not yet reaching the households they were designed to help. “That’s the photo that started everything,” she says. For Jue-Rajasingh, the sight of unused life-saving tech captures the gap between invention and impact — the problem that has shaped both her scholarship and her own social venture.

Her office reflects the path she’s taken ever since. Awards and recognitions line her shelves, including a Forbes 30 Under 30 nod and the Grinnell Prize, alongside other markers of research, entrepreneurship and undergraduate mentoring at Rice. For Jue-Rajasingh, those honors matter less as accolades than as reminders that the same core question has followed her across different stages of her career.

Another image on the wall represents the stakes of everything she’s done and hopes to do in the future. It’s another photo taken in India. An off-grid barber has just switched on a solar-powered lantern, lighting his small shop, which attracts a new customer. This scene stayed with her because it turns seemingly abstract research interests into something visible and concrete. As she puts it, it was “an economic opportunity just brought on by light.”

That same question continues to shape where her work goes next. Flyers from a recent research project in Nigeria, tied to an experiment on recycling participation, are tacked to her desk board. She recently submitted the paper for peer-review. “Different projects bring me to different places, but I’m still following the same thread — trying to close the gap between what could help people and how to actually reach them.”
 

Learn more about Professor Jue-Rajasingh

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Business magazines promise insight. This issue delivers 10 key takeaways — some surprising, some practical and a few that might change the way you think about business. Happy reading!

1. Education doesn’t stop at the classroom door. Competitions, travel and real-world experiences continue to push students to test ideas beyond the syllabus. 
2. Some of the most important business problems aren’t about invention. They’re about delivery. Faculty member Diana Jue-Rajasingh has spent her career studying a deceptively simple problem: how life-improving products actually make their way to the people they are meant to serve.
3. New technologies can bring anxiety to the classroom. AI is no different — but its real impact may be less about replacing skills and more about redefining them.
4. Gender diversity isn’t all that investors are watching. In startup accelerators, investors engage more when founder and mentor teams are aligned in their gender composition. Looking at either team in isolation misses the relationship dynamics that shape investor interest.
5. AI can boost creativity — but it depends on how you use it. The real differentiator isn’t the technology. It’s whether users have the metacognition to question and refine what AI produces. 
6. Loving your job may not be the virtue we think it is. When passion becomes a moral expectation at work, research suggests it can quietly fuel burnout.
7. Your grocery receipts might one day help determine your credit score. Retail purchasing data could open new lending pathways for millions of people without traditional credit histories.
8. Big institutions run on more than tradition. Behind the spectacle of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo lies a master class in leadership, logistics and civic scale.
9. Big visions require spaces to support them. From borrowed classrooms to McNair Hall and a new building, the homes of Rice Business mirror the school’s ambitions. 
10. The most valuable business skill is still clear thinking. Markets, technology and industries change, says associate dean of the Virani Undergraduate School of Business Bob Dittmar. The ability to reason through uncertainty endures.

Have a story idea or personal update to share with the community? Reach out to us below.
 

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Contributors

What's one book you would read over and over again, and why?

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Dan Morrell

I am hoping to pick up Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” again as an adult. I expect I will have a different appreciation of it without the pressure of having to write a term paper about it.

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Scott Pett

One of my favorite Houston novels is the dystopian legal thriller “Rule of Capture” by Christopher Brown. It portrays the city as both a real place and a version of itself pushed to a terrifying extreme.

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Helen Huneycutt

Anything by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! The writing is captivating, the characters are timeless and there’s never a dull moment with Sherlock.

If there’s one word I’d use for the last decade at Rice Business, it’s growth. We’ve doubled the size of our MBA programs, grown our tenure-track faculty by more than 40%, launched new MBA degree formats for working professionals and the Graduate Certificate in Healthcare Management program, and welcomed a new generation of students through the Virani Undergraduate School of Business. We’ve also crossed a major milestone: More than 10,000 Rice Business alumni are now a part of our global network.

But growth — on its own — was never the point. The real question was always: growth for what?

For me, the answer began with our mission: to create and disseminate knowledge in order to move industries forward and to build innovative leaders to guide them. Growth was also about “right-sizing” Rice Business — we were just too small for such a large city and state so full of opportunities.

The growth we’ve seen is not measured in square footage or enrollment alone. It is measured in the strength of the academic community we build to carry that mission forward. Our work depends on faculty engaging in top-level research, on serious academics and on students who challenge us in new ways.

Undergraduates, for example, have introduced a new center of gravity for the school. They bring a different kind of energy, a different rhythm to the day and a different set of questions about how business connects to the world. Their presence changes the conversations in our classrooms and our hallways. It changes how our graduate students think about mentorship and leadership. It changes how alumni engage when they return and see a fuller academic community in motion.

At Rice, the opportunity is especially powerful: a business major that gives students real depth with MBA-level faculty while still spending two-thirds of their coursework across the university — in engineering, the humanities, the social sciences, architecture, music — wherever their curiosity takes them.

The long-term impact of the undergraduate program will extend far beyond the campus. Over time, it will transform our alumni network, deepen our connections to industry and allow us to compete head-to-head with the very best programs in the country. That kind of momentum doesn’t happen overnight, but it is already underway. Undergraduates are forming the habits and relationships that will define this community for decades to come.

When I look ahead, what I see is not simply a larger school, but a more complete one. A school where undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, alumni, staff and the Houston business community come together in ways that weren’t possible before.

That is growth with purpose. And it is the foundation for everything that comes next.

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Bob Dittmar wanted to be an astrophysicist.

Growing up in Downers Grove, Illinois, near Argonne National Laboratory, he was surrounded by scientists. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago was his favorite place. “I knew I wanted to do research,” he says. “I just didn’t know what kind.”

Today, Dittmar is the Houston Endowment Professor of Finance and associate dean of the Virani Undergraduate School of Business at Rice. He holds a Ph.D. in finance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.S. in finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After nearly two decades at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and earlier faculty work at Indiana University, he arrived in Houston to help build something new: a rigorous undergraduate business program inside one of the country’s most distinctive research universities.

His scholarship focuses on how markets price risk — particularly extreme, low‑probability events. But in conversation, his language shifts away from formulas and toward formation. What really matters, he suggests, is helping students learn to think clearly about uncertainty — about markets, about careers and about themselves.

Q: When did finance replace astrophysics? 
A: It started in middle school. In eighth grade, I joined a stock market competition. We had to pick stocks and track them in the newspaper every morning. There was no internet. I remember running to grab the paper to check prices.

I wish I could say it was skill, but our team won. That probably hooked me. I was maybe 12 years old, and I just became fascinated with trying to understand how markets work.

At the time, I didn’t even know you could do research in finance. I just knew I liked thinking about markets and uncertainty.

Q: Your research focuses on risk. For readers who aren’t finance specialists, how would you explain what you study? 
A: All investments involve uncertainty. Most people focus on the average outcome — what we expect to happen. My research looks at the extremes.

Options markets are useful because they reveal how investors think about future possibilities. When investors pay a lot for protection against severe downturns, that tells you something about how worried they are about extreme events.

I’ve studied what we call tail risk — those unlikely but severe outcomes on the edges of the distribution — and skewness, which simply means whether bad outcomes are perceived as more likely than good ones. It’s really about how people price fear.

Q: What do people misunderstand most about risk? 
A: People are very bad at thinking probabilistically. We anchor on the expected outcome and forget about the range of possibilities.

Most risk measures rely on history — how much something has moved around in the past. But looking forward, uncertainty includes things we haven’t seen yet. Rare events happen more often than we think.

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. And there are also things we think we understand but really don’t. That’s why humility matters when we talk about markets.

Q: How does that philosophy shape how you teach undergraduates? 
A: The core finance class I teach is one of those courses I think everyone in the world should take. Present value, diversification, valuation — these aren’t just technical tools. They’re ways of thinking.

Students today can trade stocks on their phones. They can use Robinhood. They can buy crypto in seconds. But the fundamentals haven’t changed. If you don’t understand what an asset is worth and why, you’re just speculating.

So I’ll use examples like Tesla. I’ll have AI run a valuation under standard assumptions, then stretch those assumptions. The point isn’t to criticize a company. It’s to ask: What would have to be true for this price to make sense?

An asset ought to deliver something of value. Crocs may not be attractive, but they provide utility. When the fictional zombie apocalypse comes, I’d probably rather have canned goods than gold. That instinct — to ask what something really provides — is what I want students to develop.

Q: You’ve said AI is now part of your daily work. How should undergraduates think about it? 
A: I think of AI as an incredibly capable but extremely dense research assistant. It boosts productivity, but it makes mistakes.

AI and humans together are more powerful than either alone — but only if the human understands the fundamentals. If all you can do is pattern recognition or plug numbers into a spreadsheet without understanding what they mean, that’s vulnerable.

Part of undergraduate education now is teaching students how to evaluate AI’s output. Prompting well. Checking assumptions. Understanding where it goes wrong. That’s a new layer on top of traditional finance education.

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Q: What makes undergraduate business education different from MBA education? 
A: Undergraduate education is formative in a different way. These are years when students are still figuring out who they are.

An MBA student often arrives with a career identity already forming. Undergraduates are still exploring. So culture matters enormously.

I tell prospective students that choosing a college isn’t just about rankings. It’s about fit. You’re going to spend four very formative years there. If you choose purely on prestige and ignore culture, you’re missing something important.

Q: How would you describe Rice’s culture compared to other institutions where you’ve taught? 
A: Rice students are competitive, but they’re not cutthroat. They’re collaborative. That matters. Finance has a reputation for being purely competitive. But long‑term success often depends on networks, trust and teamwork.

Q: As associate dean, what are your priorities for the Virani Undergraduate School of Business? 
A: Two things. First, expanding Rice’s national footprint, particularly in finance. We place students very well in Houston and Texas. I’d like to see more placement in New York and on the West Coast.

Placement creates a virtuous cycle. When firms see strong Rice graduates performing well, the reputation builds, and opportunities expand for future students.

Second, building a strong Virani identity. Rice already has a powerful institutional culture. But we want students to feel connected to the school itself. That means co‑ curricular programming, networking initiatives and creating a sense of belonging.

A pure finance person might ask about the return on investment of that. But belonging matters. It strengthens everything else.

Q: What kind of student thrives at Rice Business? 
A: Someone who wants rigor without sacrificing humanity.

If you want an environment where people will do anything to get ahead, this probably isn’t it. That’s not what we’re building.

If you want strong fundamentals, collaboration and faculty who genuinely care about your development, then Rice might be the right place.

At the end of the day, what really matters is that students leave here knowing how to think clearly about uncertain problems. Markets will change. Technology will change. But disciplined reasoning endures.

Check out our podcast interview with Associate Dean Bob Dittmar:

This year, Rice Business will open the doors to a new building next to McNair Hall, adding another landmark to a story that has never been just about square footage.

For more than five decades, the school has grown from a young graduate program with borrowed classrooms into a business school with expanded graduate offerings, a fast-growing undergraduate presence and a broader national profile. Along the way, its physical homes changed, too. Each one marked a different stage in the school’s history — from early experimentation to institutional confidence to the scale the school now requires.

As Rice Business prepares to open the doors of its newest building, join us for a tour of the homes that shaped the school along the way.

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Sewall Hall: Borrowed Rooms, Early Traditions

Before Rice Business had a building of its own, it had borrowed rooms and a new idea.

In its earliest years, the graduate business program operated out of Sewall Hall, where it shared space with the then-new Shepherd School of Music. Today the building houses the university’s Welcome Center and a number of academic departments, including anthropology, psychology and sociology. Even without a dedicated home, the program was beginning to define itself through its curriculum and its ties to Houston’s business community.

Some of the school’s earliest traditions began there. The first investiture ceremony, for example, took place in Sewall 301. Degrees were conferred, hoods were placed and a sense of community began to take shape — even before the school had a front door of its own.

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Herman Brown Hall: The Startup Years

In 1977, the school welcomed its first full class: 55 students taught by a faculty of 10, working out of offices and classrooms in Herman Brown Hall.

These were formative years. The school launched with programs in management and accounting — and soon finance — and set an ambitious goal for itself: to become one of the leading schools of administration in the country. During this period, a major gift from Houston Endowment endowed the school and led to its renaming as the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Administration.

The scale was intimate. Classes were small, faculty offices were close together, and students and professors were building the culture of the school in real time. Herman Brown Hall housed a young program that was still defining what it would become. Over time, it became clear that the school needed a home designed specifically for its teaching, research and community life. That need helped push conversations about a permanent building from aspiration to priority.

It was also during the Herman Brown years that Rice Business began building what would become one of its defining strengths: entrepreneurship education. Professors Ed Williams and Al Napier introduced hands-on entrepreneurship teaching long before most universities offered it.

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Herring Hall: A Home of our Own

When Herring Hall opened in 1984, the school entered a new phase. Funded through a $10 million campaign and additional endowment support, the 50,000-square-foot building was designed by architect César Pelli and gave the school something it had never had before: a facility created specifically for its needs.

For the first time, the school’s classrooms, faculty offices and specialized resources were gathered in one place. Herring included tiered classrooms, a 230-seat auditorium and the Business Information Center, a library devoted to management and accounting.

Important academic changes also took shape during these years. The faculty approved the shift from the Master of Business and Public Management to the MBA, and the school later introduced a joint MBA/Master of Engineering degree in partnership with the School of Engineering.

Herring Hall also became central to the school’s ceremonial life. By the early 1990s, investiture had moved into larger nearby spaces and eventually into Herring’s courtyard, which became a recognizable gathering place for the school community.

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McNair Hall: A Bigger Stage 

The school’s next major leap came in 2002 with the opening of the building that would later be named for Houston entrepreneur and philanthropist Robert L. McNair and his wife, Janice.

At 167,000 square feet, McNair Hall represented far more than an increase in size. It signaled a larger vision for the school’s future, rooted in stronger research capacity, more sophisticated teaching spaces, expanded programs and deeper connections to industry.

The building arrived at a pivotal moment for the school and helped create the conditions for significant growth in the years that followed. With more space came greater ability to recruit faculty, attract students from across the United States and around the world, and broaden the school’s academic portfolio. MBA formats expanded to include the Executive MBA and Professional MBA, while doctoral programs grew alongside the Full-Time MBA.

During this period, Rice Business also strengthened its reputation in entrepreneurship. The Rice Business Plan Competition, launched in 2001 by Rice Alliance, grew into the world’s largest and richest student startup competition. New initiatives followed, including the Veterans Business Battle, launched in 2015, and the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge, launched in 2018. Rice also opened the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie), a campus hub supporting student startups.

Later, under Dean Peter Rodriguez, who joined Rice Business in 2016, the school expanded rapidly. Under the Rice Business name, the school doubled its MBA enrollment, added faculty and launched new programs, including an online MBA, a hybrid MBA and expanded professional and executive MBA formats. It also introduced an undergraduate business major that quickly became one of the university’s most popular programs and eventually evolved into its own academic unit: the Virani Undergraduate School of Business.

McNair Hall gave Rice Business the scale to think bigger. Over time, that success created the conditions for the next step.

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The New Building: Room for What Comes Next

Each move in the school’s history has come at a moment when its ambitions required a different kind of space.

Sewall Hall housed the earliest vision. Herman Brown Hall helped launch the program. Herring Hall gave the school a home designed for itself. McNair Hall supported a broader national and global presence.

Now Rice Business is preparing to open another building beside McNair — one designed for the school it has become.

What makes this moment different is the scale of the school’s life today. Rice Business now serves more students across more programs than ever before, from undergraduates just beginning to imagine careers in business to MBA and doctoral students preparing to lead in complex industries.

In that sense, the new building represents both a continuation and a change. Like the school’s earlier homes, it answers a practical need for space. But it also marks something larger: Rice Business is entering a new chapter with greater reach, greater visibility and a broader community than ever before.

Soon enough, the next generation of students will make the building their own. For now, it joins the story of the places that brought the school to where it is today.

Stay tuned for our next issue, which will include a full photo tour of the new building.

Based on "A Short History of the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University," by Melissa Kean