Welcome to Raise the Line with osmosis.org. Seeking solutions with leading experts on how to increase healthcare capacity so people can get the care they need during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.
Hi, I'm Rishad 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 7 years as a high school teacher and basketball coach and spent 7 more years as a college professor and basketball coach. Brian, thank you so much for being with us today.
Thanks for having me. It's good to be here.
So, I want to start off by just understanding how are you doing and how's your family doing these days?
Thanks for asking that. We are doing great. We have a lot to be thankful for. Not only the family, but the university. You know, 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.
Now, 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, you taught in college. I'm so curious about kind of what spurred you into that direction in your early years.
Well, you know, 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 and 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 and I got out and had the good fortune of the end of my first 7 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 and then I went into a small college role as a teacher and basketball coach and 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. But 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 in Arizona State teaching philosophy as part of a humanities class making $5,000 a semester living in a 1200 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 and 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. 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.
That's remarkable. I mean I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes at that point of transition. What was the initial kind of maybe excitement around Grand Canyon University when you're first kind of embarking on that journey and how has that journey gone?
After 22 years at the Apollo Group, which were great years. You know, we were the first to go out and say we were pretty confident that people can learn very well online and especially working professionals who are juggling career, family responsibilities and 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 and 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 one point 400 people a quarter and we grew from a couple thousand students to 340,000 students and it was a very transitional time in higher ed. And of course now what you hear today is everybody is moving in that direction to some extent and so we were really 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 100% since the early 90s. The cost of higher ed has gone up 350%. Students are taking out too much debt. The 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. Namely, 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, you know, 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 Americans. There was a lot of risk in what we did, but we had confidence that we had learned some things that may work and I'll be very honest with you, it worked out a lot better than we thought.
Do you think as you look out now, I mean, as you alluded to, there's so many groups that are kind of in a way trying to what you did a decade you said a decade ago, I would argue maybe two decades ago in terms of like even 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?
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. And 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, etc. And 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 mods, given what people's goals are, what their lifestyles are. And 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. And that is true in the natural sciences as well as it is in those areas that are a little bit easier to teach using technology. There's going to be a rapid expansion of people being able to do things that are normally done in laboratories, and 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 to 19-year-old students, 90,000 students that are attending online, and that will grow to 150,000 students. But there's a new model emerging that'll be a hybrid of those two things. And it'll be people who have graduated in 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, and 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. And they'll be short, intense, very rigorous programs that can take people who maybe right now they have a college degrees, but they're working in 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 5 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 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. And so this new re-career model is something that we're working very hard on.
