Vanguard University’s new business school has a founding dean with experience managing funds on Wall Street to the Middle East.
The Costa Mesa-based private Christian university appointed Thomas Arnold to the position in April to lead the Patty Arvielo School of Business and Management.
“I feel like I’ve been training for this my whole life,” Arnold told the Business Journal.
Arnold was previously assistant dean of the Argyros College of Business and Economics at Chapman University, where he also directed the real estate program.
Vanguard University last April named its new business school after Patty Arvielo, the co-founder and chief executive of Tustin mortgage lender New American Funding alongside her husband Rick Arvielo, following a donation of an undisclosed amount from the family.
The gift will support the launch of a new Master of Business Administration (MBA) program in 2025, as well as fund endowed faculty chairs and scholarships.
It’s the first business school in the U.S. to be named after a Latina woman, officials said.
“I hope to really be a role model for those that are coming behind me, so that I’m not the first anymore,” Patty told the Business Journal earlier this year.
The school officially launched this fall and offers seven programs ranging from accounting to business administration.
First Gen Latina
Patty Arvielo knows the importance of having a role model in the finance industry.
“I can probably name one business Latina mentor that I had, but we don’t speak about them publicly in the media,” Patty said.
She said she wants the diverse student population at Vanguard to be able to see themselves in her.
Vanguard in 2015 was designated a Hispanic Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education. About 47% of its undergraduate students are Hispanic with 35% being first-generation college students, according to officials.
A first gen Latina herself, Patty was the oldest of three children and worked at a young age to help support her family financially.
She didn’t attend college and instead began working at credit rating agency TransUnion at age 16, working her way up to branch manager and assistant vice president at Countrywide Home Mortgage.
In 2003, Patty and her husband started New American Funding together.
New American Funding reported $426.7 million in revenue for 2023, down 50% from $935.2 million the year prior. Patty said that 2023 was one of the worst years for the mortgage lending market due to high interest rates dicouraging home buyers.
Despite this, she said the company is currently in growth mode after acquiring Chicago-based Draper and Kramer Mortgage Corp. for an undisclosed amount.
The acquisition, announced in February, will help expand New American Funding’s presence into the Midwest and along the East Coast, according to the company.
“Rick and I are fairly conservative, and we’ve been planning for this high-interest rate market,” Patty said. “We saved so much of our capital to take advantage of the down market to grow.”
New American Funding also paid $31 million for One MacArthur tower, a nine-story office building in Santa Ana’s South Coast Metro area that will serve as the company’s new headquarters.
New American Funding plans to occupy the seventh and eighth floors of the tower, Rick previously told the Business Journal in February.
Finance Background
Arnold has 20 plus years of experience stepping into organizations and evaluating where improvements can be made.
“I think I’ve always been good at being an interpreter or liaison for different ways of thinking about things,” Arnold said.
Arnold spent 11 years in the Middle East overseeing global real estate for the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Arnold is credited with tripling assets under management and managing direct reports from 32 nationalities during his tenure.
He’s also a senior advisor at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
Arnold initially majored in law and was an attorney at Holland & Knight LLP before he realized he didn’t want to practice law. He then returned to school to get his MBA and interned on Wall Street the summer after he graduated.
He said his time in private equity has helped him perform in-depth reviews of syllabi and coursework for the 64 courses being offered this fall, including new classes on generative artificial intelligence and data visualization.
The business school plans to roll out a new real estate minor with classes being offered as early as January.
It’s also launching a new honors program called the Arvielo Scholars that will be open to freshman students.
Arnold said he wants to create more internship opportunities for students by becoming involved with the CEO Leadership Alliance of Orange County, the Orange County Business Council and the Urban Land Institute to name a few.
This semester, the business school counts 500 students with overall enrollment up about 5% year over year.
While this may not sound like a significantly large increase, many small private universities are experiencing shrinking enrollment, according to Arnold.
Part of the struggle with enrollment comes from skepticism regarding the quality of education as well as rising costs of attending, he said.
“Public institutions are only dealing with a part of this,” Arnold said. “Private institutions, unless they have very large endowments, oftentimes are tuition-dependent, so it’s really about enrollment at the end of the day.”
He believes Orange County’s “healthy commercial environment” will help the business school continue to grow its enrollment each year.
“Our expectation is that the business school, with the generosity of Patty Arvielo and the work we’re doing as a collective school, we should be growing in spite of the environment,” Arnold said.
