Flexible Education is the Future - Brian Mueller, President of Grand Canyon University

RISHI DESAI:Hi, I'm Rishi Desai. Today on Raise the Line, I'm happy to be joined by Brian Mueller, President of Grand Canyon University. Prior to that, Brian spent 22 years at the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, where he held executive positions at the University of Phoenix, including CEO, chief operating officer and senior vice president. This experience helped him transform Grand Canyon University from a financially troubled university into a $5 billion institution that has become a driving force in higher education today. Now, Brian started out his career spending seven years as a high school teacher and basketball coach, and spent seven more years as a college professor and basketball coach. Brian, thank you so much for being with us today.

BRIAN MUELLER:Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

RISHI DESAI:I want to start out by just understanding, how are you doing and how's your family doing these days?

BRIAN MUELLER:Thanks for asking that. We are doing great. We have a lot to be thankful for, not only the family but the university. COVID has put a lot of strain on a lot of people, a lot of organizations, but we to this point have moved through it very successfully and are very grateful for that. So thank you for asking.

RISHI DESAI: One part of your background that is immediately striking to me is that you were a basketball coach for the high school level, the college level, you taught in high school and taught in college. I'm so curious about what spurred you into that direction in your early years.

BRIAN MUELLER:I knew when I was in high school that I wanted to teach and coach in high school. I had a lot of good coaches, a lot of good teachers that helped me along the way. I knew early on that I wanted to teach and coach, and so I went to a college where I could learn to do that, where I could play baseball and basketball. I got out and had the good fortune at the end of my first seven years of working for some great people, and then build a pretty good high school basketball program. We actually lost in the state finals in Denver, Colorado after a 25-win season. Then I went into a small college role as a teacher and basketball coach, and really, really enjoyed that as well. We built a pretty good small college basketball program, went from eight wins to 12 to 21, and just missed going to the national tournament at the NAIA level.

The bottom line is I really liked being around high school kids. I really liked being around college kids. I found that very invigorating. It was a very satisfying job for me. But then as my family grew and I was in a PhD program at Arizona State, teaching philosophy as part of a humanities class, making $5,000 a semester, living in a 1,200-square-foot house with my brother-in-law— me, him, my wife, three kids, and then my wife informed me we had a fourth one on the way. I had to make a change, at least temporarily. I got hired in at the University of Phoenix as they were just beginning to make payroll and organizing what they were doing in a pretty impactful way. I never intended to stay there, but actually built a 22-year career there where I learned some things that you just couldn't learn in an educational program, a PhD program, which really helped us as we started out at Grand Canyon.

RISHI DESAI:That's remarkable. I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes at that point of transition. What was the initial excitement around Grand Canyon University when you were first embarking on that journey, and how has that journey gone?

BRIAN MUELLER:After 22 years at the Apollo Group, which were great, great years, we were the first to go out and say, "We're pretty confident that people can learn very, very well online, and especially working professionals who are juggling career or family responsibilities." Nobody else was believing that that could be done in the early 90s, in the mid 90s, and we were very confident we could do that. So we really had the world to ourselves for about a decade. We actually went to the public markets to get an infusion of dollars, and we built millions and millions of dollars worth of technology. We were hiring at 1.4 hundred people a quarter, and we grew from a couple thousand students to 340,000 students. It was a very, very transitional time in higher ed. Of course now, what you hear today is everybody is moving in that direction to some extent. And so we really were out in front from that standpoint.

In traditional higher ed, most people are aware of this a little bit, but not the specifics. The cost of living has gone up in this country a hundred percent since the early nineties. The cost of higher ed has gone up 350%. Students are taking out too much debt. Students are taking too long to complete programs. Programs aren't designed closely enough to where the real good jobs are in our world, and so even recent college graduates are underemployed. We were wondering whether we had learned some things at Phoenix around using the public markets to get access to capital, large amounts of capital, to really kickstart a new financial model. And then if we could create a hybrid campus that would leverage a common infrastructure, if we could flip the economics of higher ed and make it affordable to all socioeconomic classes of Americans. Mainly for us, it was Christian private university education.

That had never been done before, and that's what we came to Grand Canyon to do. Grand Canyon was a small university that was struggling right here in Phoenix, Arizona, but we thought we had the platform to do something completely different that would really revolutionize the economics of higher education and make it affordable to all socioeconomic classes of America. It was a lot of risk in what we did, but we had confidence that we had learned some things that may work. Very honestly, it worked out a lot better than we thought.

RISHI DESAI:As you alluded to, there's so many groups that are in a way trying to do what you did a decade ago, I would argue maybe two decades ago. Thinking about this, are there certain trends that you're seeing now that others should be aware of, especially in the health sciences, or anything you're noticing that just isn't in the mainstream consciousness?

BRIAN MUELLER:No, I think you're right. COVID has had some devastating impacts on all of our lives and all of our organizations, but some of the good that's going to come out of that is that people have been forced to think about how they're doing things. I don't think anything will change as much as education will change over the next 10 to 20 years. It used to be from a higher ed standpoint that small and elite was getting a lot of credit and rankings, et cetera. In the future, it's going to be large and very flexible. What people realize is that if they're going to survive in the future, whether it's in the K-12 world or the higher ed world, they're going to have to have multiple delivery models, given what people's goals are, what their lifestyles are. If you're going to survive—and there'll be a lot of universities that won't survive going forward—but if you're going to survive, you're going to do it by understanding the consumer in new and different ways and being able to reach those consumers in very flexible ways.

That is true in the natural sciences as well as in those areas that are a little bit easier to teach using technology. There's going to be a rapid expansion. People being able to do things that are normally done in laboratories. There's going to be new modalities emerge. For example, we at Grand Canyon University have 23,000 students growing to 40 on our traditional campus, 18 and 19 year old students, 90,000 students that are attending online that will grow to 150,000 students. But there's a new model emerging that'll be a hybrid of those two things. It'll be people who have graduated in the last 10 years that are underemployed. They're going to want to be reemployed in natural science areas, in engineering areas, in computer science, in cybersecurity. Those programs are going to require a hybrid of the two models. They'll be able to do a lot of the didactic work in an online model, but they'll do a lot of the lab work in person in a laboratory. 

There will be short, intense, very rigorous programs that can take people who maybe right now  have college degrees, but they're working retail. And for example, move them into a nursing career or move them into a cybersecurity career. Right now, we're going to need a million additional nurses just in the next five years. There are also 300,000 jobs available that pay on average $92,000 in cybersecurity. I'm not against liberal arts education because we have a lot of liberal arts programs and we're working on ways for people to move into careers through those, but there's a lot of people that have degrees that they've earned in the last 10 years that they can't make work, and so they're looking for a new model. They don't want to go back to class like they did when they were 18 years old; they can't go totally online either. So this new career model is something that we're working very hard on.

RISHI DESAI:That's really, really interesting, and something that I hear a lot about on a personal level. You mentioned at the beginning of this, the idea of these very few elite schools that was kind of the old way of thinking about it, and now there's this recognition of the fact that a different model is necessary. I think that there is some parallel there with healthcare. Classically, it's been—I feel like I have some liberty to say this because I'm an MD—but there's this hierarchy where MDs had this very vaunted special position at the top of this hierarchy, when we know that that's just not the case. The fact is, a lot of healthcare is done by allied health professions, and it speaks to the fact that that's where a lot of the job growth is. What are your thoughts on that?

BRIAN MUELLER:Absolutely. I think that's a very good parallel. We think a core competency of ours needs to be where's the economy going, where the jobs are going to be. Create programs that can help people get those jobs. Do it in a way that is very time efficient, that builds a lot of excellence into the programming, but also is affordable. We need to increasingly make education affordable to all socioeconomic classes of Americans. At GCU, our campus has grown from 900 students to 23,000 students, it's on the way to 40,000. We haven't raised tuition in 12 years. The average student on our campus pays less than they would pay at a state university. Our students graduate with less debt than the average state university student. So we are emerging as an academic institution. Our reputation is growing because of our ability to create very practical methodologies for people to engage with us, and to do it in a way it doesn't strap them with ridiculous amounts of debt.

RISHI DESAI:One of the things that I've always been curious about is when a student, let's say, graduates from GCU, that student gets a certain type of education, a certain quality of education, and then they go into the workplace, and you may not have a lot of control over that workplace culture and environment. It might be very different from the nurturing environment they experienced at GCU. How do you prepare students when they're going to be leaving and may not get the same sort of culture that they've grown to get used to?

BRIAN MUELLER:Yes, it's a very good question, and it's a very interesting challenge, but really an important one. We have 15 advisory boards and we have over 500 organizations and companies represented on those advisory boards, engineering, technology, education, healthcare, counseling. The reason we do that is, one, we want a lot of input. How's the workplace changing? What skill sets are necessary? What do students need to know in today's nursing world, today's education world, today's technology world? 

The other reason we do that is because we want students involved in internships across the board no later than their sophomore year, so that they get into a workplace and they start getting a feel for what's necessary to be successful in a workplace. Internships, actual experiences in companies, in schools, hospitals are critical as part of a person's education. And the more that we can do that, the more we can partner with these organizations that we're working with and get the student best prepared for the workplace.

When we had winter graduation this year, afterwards, I was talking to a lot of families. It was amazing how many, when I would say, "What's next?", they would say, "Well, I got an internship at this company and they hired me before I graduated. I'm on my way." Or, "I did my clinical experience at this hospital. They've hired me; I'm on my way." Or, "I did my student teaching at this school."

So seeing this thing as a shared responsibility, I even go as far to say that eventually, we need to build into the whole accreditation process what the end user of our students is saying about our graduates. What are the technology firms saying about our IT graduates? What are the businesses saying about our business graduates? What are the schools saying about our education graduates? It's obviously our goal to be number one when people in the Southwest are looking for students. The best way for us to do that is to keep building those advisory boards, keep building those internships so that we can get people into the workplace as soon as possible.

RISHI DESAI:Do you see a lot of students—you mentioned the idea of folks wanting to level up or folks that are underemployed—do you see folks coming back? Let's say you graduate from Grand Canyon University, you go into career A and then three, four or five years later, you decide you want to make a switch. Do you see a lot of folks coming back to GCU to kind of level up again once they've already gone through one educational experience with you?

BRIAN MUELLER:Yes, but it has to be a new model. We learned a long time ago, and we're the first to do it at Phoenix, that you don't educate a 40-year-old the same way you educate an 18-year-old. 18-year-olds are going through not just an educational experience, but they're going through a socialization experience. 40-year-olds don't need to worry about that. They're socializing their own children. These re-career people—and we're already way down the road with nurses, nurse practitioners, the cybersecurity experts—we're looking for people that have bachelor's degrees who want to relocate to Phoenix and be involved in a program where, because they already have a bachelor's degree, they have very little gen ed to do. Maybe some that is specific to the program they're going into, maybe specific science courses for math, for example. But they get right into, very quickly, a very rigorous experience. In nursing, it's 16 months.

We have communications majors, psychology majors and students coming back. They're willing to move and relocate to do this, but they want a very intense, very rigorous, very hands-on experience, combined didactic material learned online and lab work done in a laboratory that can get them immediately into a growing profession where there are very good paying jobs and a prospect of a long-term career.

We actually have, right now, 25 partnerships where we're helping other universities doing that. Marquette, Loyola of Chicago, Northeastern are some of the schools that we have partnerships with. We actually built a laboratory about an hour away from their current location, and we look for baccalaureate prepared students who are underemployed that want to re career. Right now, the big focus is on nursing, nurse practitioners, occupational therapists. But as we do this in even bigger way in Phoenix, we'll be looking to do it with cybersecurity specialists, with software engineers, I'm hoping mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, et cetera. We've got to do a better job on the front end so students understand from a career perspective what they should be studying when they're going through college the first time. But right now, we've got a whole group of people that need to be in a situation where they can get into a more long-term productive career. And that's why that new model is very important.

RISHI DESAI:Yes, that makes a lot of sense. The areas you flagged I think are areas where there's a lot of employment opportunity at a time when the U.S. is going through tremendous unemployment. So that makes a lot of sense. Maybe one point I'd like to close on, then, is, what advice do you have for folks that are coming out specifically in, let's say the health sciences, where they're starting their careers? What is one thing you would let them know or share with them as they try to navigate their early days in their clinical life?

BRIAN MUELLER:Well, regardless of what organization that you go into, in my opinion, you typically get hired initially based upon your credentials. Where did you go to school? What degree did you earn? How did you do in school? What kind of references do you have? Or if you've had some work experience, how have you done in your employment? But then you move forward and you advance based upon not just what you can individually do for the company, but how much of a team player you are. How well do you collaborate? How well do you work with other people? How well do you take advice? Are you able to take criticism productively?

I tell our students from my coaching background all the time, there's two things you can control every single day. One of them is how hard you work, and the second one is how good a teammate are you. I know in our organization that we employ 14,000 people now with full-time, part-time adjuncts, student workers, et cetera. As we look to promote, move people up, we're always looking for people that are easy to work with, that understand where the university's trying to go and can help us get there, because that's going to help them move their careers along. As much as those technical skills are important, and obviously, they are, those softer skills: How well do I communicate? How well do I collaborate? How much of a team player am I? How well do I understand the organization's overall goals and contribute to them? Those things are equally as important in terms of moving people along in their careers.

RISHI DESAI:I think that's a really wonderful note to end on, the idea of the importance of soft skills and communication skills in particular. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Brian. It sounds like you've done that your whole life, starting with coaching and into your final point on communication skills in the workplace. I really, really appreciate your advice.

BRIAN MUELLER:Thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed it. I appreciate it very much.

RISHI DESAI: I'm Rishi Desai and thanks for checking out today's show. Remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise the line. We're all in this together.