Untapped Potential with Brian Mueller

AI is coming along at a time when there are 8 billion people in the world. And what we should be able to do to increase the productivity of people and organizations using AI should be transformational. You know, we should be getting more out of the ground so everybody's got enough food to eat. The problem with AI is that people are selfish. And if we let the selfish people dictate the direction it moves, it'll be a disaster.

Thanks for having me. This is very exciting.

Yeah, I tell our students all the time, you know, whatever you think you're going to be doing when you're 72 years old like me when you're 22 and graduating from college is probably not going to be even close to what you're thinking today. Life is absolutely an adventure and I had no aspirations to be a college president or to lead a publicly traded company. I graduated from high school having a great experience. I loved my classes. I loved playing sports, playing basketball and baseball and I wanted to be a high school teacher. So, I went to a small Christian college in order to prepare to be a secondary high school teacher.

I taught for 7 years, two in Michigan and five in Colorado and I taught psychology, sociology, world history, theology. I was a fanatical basketball coach. I had a good program in Denver and then went back to my alma mater, Concordia in Nebraska and was their basketball coach for 4 years and taught in the education department. Moved to Arizona because I wanted to finish a PhD program at ASU. My wife is a native of Arizona. I love Arizona. One thing led to another and after 11 years of teaching and coaching, I was married and had married way over my head. We were living with my brother-in-law in a 1,200 square foot house. He had two pit bulls and I had a wife and three kids. And I came home towards the end of my second semester. I was teaching philosophy as part of a humanities class at ASU, making $5,000 a semester. Things weren't really looking very good. And my wife said, 'I have a surprise for you. We need to talk.' And I got real nervous about that and as it turned out, she said, 'It's probably not what you think. We're going to have our fourth child.' And it was like my life passed right in front of me and I thought, 'Man, your plan is not working.'

And so I wandered into the University of Phoenix in 1987. They were just getting started. And I never intended to stay there. They offered me a job. I'm not good at most things in life, but they had me recruiting students and I was really good at that. And one thing led to another and I really started to like what they were doing. It was this new market in higher education that was emerging, teaching 32-year-old students who want to go back to college while they're raising families and building careers or in bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. We had a specific model for how we were teaching those students that was really attractive, it was really effective. And eventually they said, 'Would you go out and run our campus in New Mexico?' Which I did, that went really well. Then they said, 'Go out and run our campus in San Diego.' Which I did, that went really well. So I'm building and we're growing. And then they called 10 years after I started in 1998 and they said, 'You know what? This thing Al Gore has done almost single-handedly, this internet that he's created, we think the next big application of the internet might be higher education and we'd like you to take charge of that and help us think about that.' I'm the least technical person in the world, but I wanted to move back to Arizona. I love Arizona.

And so I said, 'Okay.' And so that started this odyssey of can we teach effectively at a distance? Can we teach online? And we stuck with our learning model, how adults best learn. Adult students, practitioner faculty members, application-based curriculum, big focus on writing, critical thinking, problem-solving. We were having tremendous impact all over the country doing that in physical brick-and-mortar locations, and I thought, let's not change anything. Let's bring the faculty and the students together on the internet, and let's keep everything else the same. And after a couple years, I went to our CEO and I said, you know, we've got the tiger by the tail here. Nobody thinks we can do this or should be doing this, and I'm telling you we can do it, and we can do it tremendously effectively.

He said, 'What do you need?' I said, 'Capital. We need access to capital. We need to build this thing out.' Well, he had the idea of going to pitch the idea to Global Markets. I'm a history teacher, theology teacher. I've never taken a business class in my life. But here we are out there pitching our idea to Wall Street, and Wall Street loved our idea. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars into it. We are building technology like you can't believe. We're hiring 400 people a quarter. We grew from a couple thousand students to 200,000 students between 2000 to 2006.

And this whole thing is being run by a history teacher and a basketball coach, which is the unbelievable irony of the whole thing. But as a result of that, they said, 'We'd like to make you CEO of the entire company.' And so I'm running this 16.2 billion-dollar market cap company, and we built it to 400,000 students.

And 3 years after they made me the CEO, Grand Canyon called and said, 'Would you be interested in coming to Grand Canyon University?' And I thought, 'Probably not,' but the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, my early life has all been about Christian education. I was an elementary school student, high school student, university student, and then a high school teacher, university professor, basketball coach. Higher education is getting unaccessible to the majority of Americans. Maybe we've learned some things that we could use to completely flip the script and make it affordable to all socioeconomic classes of Americans.

And so we came over here, we walked the campus, it was less than a thousand students, it was $20 million in debt. Buildings had been built shortly after World War II. 33rd Avenue on Camelback was the worst crime place in the city of Phoenix. Why would we leave all this? But, you know, it was like maybe God has put this plan in place from the beginning. And so, we decided to come.

And we came in 2008. We told the board we wanted to do something big, which means we had to go to the public markets. If you remember 2008, that was not the time to go to the public markets. We came here in June, by November it's a disaster. I told my friend, I said, 'Listen, don't tell our wives anything about this, anything about what we've done here.' But, we went out in November and we're pitching an idea about building a Christian university in Phoenix, Arizona, when there had not been an IPO out on Wall Street for 90 days. Longest streak in the history of Wall Street. I don't know how we got it out, but we did.

Stock got out at $12. That gave us $254 million. We brought that back to Phoenix, and the idea is there's two major markets in higher ed. We're going to have large, growing student bodies in both major markets. So, we're going to start with the online program and we're going to build that. And for 3 years we did that, and that started to really take traction and it was profitable, so we started to pour money into the campus.

So, on our campus we've got 18-year-old students leaving high school going to college and have that experience like you did and I did. Our online campus is for working adults, but if we had two large student bodies leveraging a common infrastructure, we thought we could flip the economics. It's worked out way better than we could ever imagine.

You know, we built a campus of 25,000 students. We're on our way to 50,000 students. Our online campus is 108,000 students. We have now building hybrid campuses throughout the country, eventually 80 of them. We've got 47 of them stood up where we're going to do hybrid learning, things like nursing where some of the learning can be done online, some has to be done in a physical brick-and-mortar laboratory setting. That's got 7,000 students on its way to 48,000 students. God has blessed this in a way that we could never have imagined. I thought we had a good idea. I could have never predicted this.

You know, the Bible is full of examples of how God uses people in ways that they would never have imagined. You know, it's just that that's the story of the Bible. God taking Moses and saying yes you can do it. And I'm going to help you. You can speak and you're going to make it and you can do it. You can go through all the other examples and it's that's kind of how it is. You know, I wanted to be a high school teacher and a basketball coach. And I was going down that track. Eventually I wanted to be a university professor and basketball coach. But I tell our students all the time, if you want to give God a good laugh, tell him what your plans are. Because he's got his own plans for us. It was 57, I was 57 when we came here. And I thought, you know, it's pretty clear to me that we've learned two things that we could have never learned in a PhD program. How to use the public markets to get access to capital and how to use the internet to reach the world. Those two things weren't being taught anywhere, but we learned those things by doing them. And then this thing, Grand Canyon University, it was always a great place. It was a small private college with great programs in education and business and small college athletics and fine art. It was always a great place, but always struggling financially, always on the verge of closing, which a lot of Christian universities are. But the fact that it was 20 minutes away from where we learned all those things is providential. That's divine intervention. That was part of God's plan. There was no question about that. I could have never done this by myself. If I had to take, you know, a thousand people and tell them, you know, we're going to move to Lincoln, Nebraska or someplace else to do this. It was 20 minutes away. And so it was, yes, there was a lot of risk. There was a lot of risk. We were going to try to do something that was, I wanted to create something where families would have the opportunity to send their sons or daughters and have them be involved in a very rigorous academic experience, but one that was rooted in the truth about the world. The biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption, restoration. Because those are the two things, the free market system and the Christian worldview perspective that created the most prosperity in the history of the world. Now, there's another part to this whole thing, which is this neighborhood, but I'll lay that down. Now, it did take some amount of courage and a willingness to take a risk. There's no question about that. But the other side of that is God has been part of this thing. There is no question about that. There's just too many things that came together to make this work that is more than coincidence.

You know, it is interesting. That whole thing is very interesting. There's so much tradition to higher education. There are so many traditional thoughts about it. You know, the system is set up in a way to reward some things and not others. US News & World Report rankings are probably the worst thing out there in terms of universities really achieving the kinds of things they should achieve because so much of it is only measurements that don't have anything to do with it. You know, when you read the gospels, Jesus saw untapped potential everywhere. He saw untapped potential in the 12 people he chose to be his followers. You know, so many of the people that end up participating with him and being part of his miraculous work with human beings. And that's what exists in America. And there's vast amounts of untapped potential in America today because universities won't think creatively about how to help people move towards their potential by enrolling and participating in college post-secondary education because universities want to deliver it on their terms, not the students' terms.

I'll give you a good example. We have a tremendous shortage of teachers in this country. And that's a real threat to the country and it's the university's fault because they're waiting for 17-year-olds to make a decision to become a teacher, go to college for 4 years, then step into the classroom. There's nothing wrong with that, but if that's how you see it, your market's this big. We went to the New York public school district and said, 'You know, you got paraprofessionals that walk through your buildings every single day. Many of them are single mothers. They're making 15 or 20,000 dollars a year. Their kids are going to the school. They have the same hours as their kids' hours, which is why they're doing it. But you can tell whether they, do they show up on time? Do they dress professionally? Do they get along with kids?' That's untapped potential. If we could deliver the education into your school district so they could become licensed teachers, that's the future of your teaching force. We've got 10,000 students in that program now. Paraprofessionals all over the country in school districts in Chicago and Philadelphia and Milwaukee and New York and Pittsburgh and we just signed deals in LA and Miami-Dade County. A Christian university in Phoenix, Arizona is helping major public school districts all over the country fulfill their biggest need, which is the shortage of teachers. But we have to deliver the education to those young people. I say young, a lot of them are 23 or 24 years old, in ways that they can consume it, which is at a distance.

The reason we're building those 80 locations, those hybrid campuses, there's a nursing shortage. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Nursing is a great occupation. It's a ticket into the middle class. It involves serving other people. And so why is there a nursing shortage? Because universities keep their nursing programs very small. They want elite statistics in terms of NCLEX examination pass rates. And they don't want to lose a lot of money. Nursing programs lose money. We're going to have the, we have the largest nursing program in the country and it's going to be by far the largest. When we get 80 locations built, we have 47 of them up, there'll be 600 students per location. That's another 48,000 students. We're producing 90 plus percent pass rate, first time pass rates on the NCLEX exam. And we're giving young people all over the country a chance to get into a middle class occupation that could become an upper middle class occupation and then they can fulfill their God-given responsibility, which is to take the gospel into the workplace. But it's the unwillingness of provosts and deans and faculty members to see the potential they have if they're willing to be creative about how to deliver this and help people realize their God-given potential.

AI is, I think, you know, when you think about the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, the world's been redeemed. Jesus is going to come back at some point and make it all right. He's going to restore the whole thing. But in this period of restoration, he's counting on his church, his people to make the world a better place. John 3:16 starts out with 'For God so loved' God loves the world. It's fallen, there's a lot of evil, there's a lot of hardship, but he still loves the world and he doesn't like to see people hungry or without a place to live or without a future to take care of their family. And when you think about it from that standpoint, AI is coming along at a time when there are 8 billion people in the world. And what we should be able to do to increase the productivity of people and organizations using AI should be transformational. You know, we should be getting more out of the ground so everybody's got enough food to eat. We should be able to build houses for $10,000 so everybody has a place to live. We should come up with new forms of transportation so people can get around. AI could really propel this world in a direction that could be unbelievably positive.

But it's going to have to be managed by the church, by Christians, by Christian universities, by Christian schools. We now have a master's degree program in AI, a baccalaureate program in AI, a certificate program in AI, but most importantly, we're integrating, we've integrated the Christian worldview perspective across all of our colleges and all of our programs, most of our classes. We've integrated free market thinking. Now we're in the process of integrating AI so that every student that graduates knows how to use AI to be a more productive teacher, a more productive nurse, a more productive engineer, a more productive computer scientist. We've got to grab hold of this opportunity here and we've got to help people learn how to integrate it to become more productive, more efficient. And we, a couple years ago, rewrote our mission statement and it finishes out by saying, 'We want to create human flourishing by putting the needs of others in front of our own.' The problem with AI is that people are selfish. And if we let the selfish people dictate the direction it moves, it'll be a disaster.

But if we get AI into the Christian schools especially and into the churches so that we've got people who are willing to use this incredible technology to put the needs of others in front of their own and create prosperity for everybody, we're sitting on the precipice of something great. Now, we're excited in Arizona because Arizona's going to have one of the most dynamic economies in the world going forward. What's going to happen in here the next 10 years and I spoke at the legislature a couple weeks ago. They asked me to speak at the opening orientation and I said, 'You know what you guys should be focused on? You guys should be singularly focused on one thing. How to take as many young people as we possibly can whose families have been living below the poverty line and move them into a middle-class job that could become an upper-middle-class job in the next 10 years.'

You know, Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society, the war on poverty, the welfare system. If you wanted to keep minorities and poor populations poor, you would create a welfare system because it creates dependency. In the next 10 years, what we can do in Arizona because of the explosion of the economy and the fact that the supply and demand in the labor force is flipped is that we need to get as many, there's more demand than there is supply. That means these kids that are living in our neighborhood and going to high school in our neighborhood should have the opportunity when they graduate from high school to as soon as possible get into a middle-class job. That will take care of 90% of your problems. They were talking to me about Medicaid. I said, 'Medicaid is very easy. You've got too many people who are getting benefits that aren't paying into it.' You put everybody to work, which is what God intended in the first place, right? He put Adam in the garden to work the garden. That was part of the plan from the beginning. We get everybody to go to work and get them into middle-class jobs, it'll take care of 90% of our problems.

Yeah, you know, that was part of this whole plan. It was providential. There's no question about it. This place was 20 minutes away from where we had learned all those things. And I probably a thousand people left that place and came over here over the course of the last 11 or 12 years. There were a hundred of them that were really key. And I could have never done this by myself. It was way too big an undertaking. So, after we got here in 2008, by 2011 we were starting to see that this might work. You know, we took that capital and we were putting it to use and it was like, 'Wow.' None of us are commercial real estate people, but most commercial real estate people would say you don't build a $2 billion campus, which we have here. It's ranked the 20th nicest campus in the country now. You don't build a $2 billion campus in Maryvale, the Canyon Corridor, West Phoenix. You go to Scottsdale or Paradise Valley or Gilbert or any of these great, maybe California. Maybe Cherry Creek, Colorado, I don't know. But you don't build it here. We thought, you know, maybe if Jesus came back today, he'd probably come to a place like this. He tended to gravitate towards people that were hurting. There are 72 different languages that get spoken within 10 square miles of this place. God's brought the world to us. I tell our students all the time, I'm completely supportive of international mission trips, but understand, God's bringing the world to us. They're all over the place from Africa, from the Middle East, from Central and South America. And so, we're doing it here. We're planting our flag here.

And we started to pour money into this campus and it started to grow. And we said, you know, we're going to, I think what we need to do is something the government can't do. If you go back to the early '60s and Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, the war on poverty, the welfare system, 14% of Americans live below the poverty line. Today, 14% of Americans live below the poverty line. It hasn't cut into it at all. But, if you put a free market entity with a Christian worldview perspective in the middle of a neighborhood like this, I wonder what might happen. So, we put together a five-point plan and we said, 'The number one, the first thing a neighborhood like this needs is jobs.' We've created 16,000 jobs since we got here. We've spun 10 businesses off of this one. We've just created another 600 jobs. We hire people in the neighborhood. It gives them a salary. It gives them benefits. They can send their kids to college for free. It's a reason to live in this neighborhood and to prosper in this neighborhood. And we're continuing to spin businesses off of this one. We have a business incubation center on the east side of our campus. It has 16 new businesses incubating right now, which we want to move into the neighborhood to create more jobs. The first thing a place like this needs is jobs. The second thing it needs is safety. We work with the city of Phoenix police. We have our own police department. 27th Avenue was the worst place in the city of Phoenix. Prostitution, drugs, pimps, criminal activity. We are working like crazy. Four-mile stretch between what we call Indian School and Northern. And you know, the book of John tells us what? Christians should do what? Bring light into the darkest places. And we are getting the criminal

activity out of this neighborhood. Our campus is safe because we have our own police force. But we want the neighborhood to be safe for the people who live here, so they can stay here and prosper here. And we are going to get it done. I mean, what you're going to see on 27th Avenue the next four or five years is going to be literally unbelievable. We're going to take it from the darkest place in the city of Phoenix and make it the lightest place in the city of Phoenix to show people what Jesus can do in terms of bringing light into darkness. So, that's the second thing is safety. The third thing is homes. We have the largest Habitat for Humanity program in the world going on here. We've rehabbed over now 600 homes. And we're just going to keep going. The fourth thing is students. We're getting kids from all 50 states. They're coming from everywhere. But, we're not leaving the kids in this neighborhood behind. So, we've raised over $20 million to award over now 2,300 full ride scholarships to kids that come right out of this neighborhood. 95% of them are minority kids that live below the poverty line, but their average incoming GPAs now are nearly 4.0. So, the word's gotten out that if you do well in high school, you have a chance to stay right in your neighborhood, go to college, become an engineer, become a computer scientist, become a nurse, become a teacher, whatever. And we're just going to keep going with that scholarship program and those opportunities for these kids right in this neighborhood. The fifth thing is called City Serve. I won't go into the detail of it, but we have contracts with Walmart, Target, Amazon, Costco, major retailers. They sell goods into the marketplace. A percent gets returned. Can't be resold. That stuff was being put on trucks and taken to landfills. It's now getting on trucks and being brought here to our City Serve 100,000 square foot warehouse. We've got people over there that take the stuff off the trucks, inventory it, put it up on racks. We have over now 200 pods, points of distribution inner-city churches throughout Arizona. They identify the needs in their community, and it's household goods, tables, chairs, couches, microwaves, refrigerators. It's unbelievable. And we've gotten over 18 million dollars now with brand new goods to over 70,000 families in Arizona in just the last less than 4 years.

So, that five-point plan has spurred now 100 other ministries. Our students now go into the neighborhood Monday through Friday in the evenings and they go into a Syrian refugee apartment place or something from the Congo and they help kids with their homework and teach them English as a second language. We just had a Muslim community about a mile from here who our kids have been working with their kids for about 3 years. They just brought the entire community to one of our chapel services to hear the gospel. Wow. That's kind of a miracle. That is kind of a miracle, but you can't almost separate now the university from the neighborhood and the community. It's become part of the story in a way that it's attracting a lot of kids here. I mean, this generation of young people want to be impactful even before they leave college. And if they come here, they have a chance to be impactful in real ways. So, it's really become a part of the story and very honestly it goes back to I absolutely believe God wanted this to happen here. I look out over our campus now and I think what this used to look like 17 years ago and what it looks like now, classrooms, laboratories, residence halls, 35 residence halls, 32 restaurants, six swimming pools, seven fitness areas. Sometimes I ask, are we running a resort here or are we running a university? But who could have ever imagined this happening in this short a period of time? But it did. And we got to steward it now in a way that the gospel becomes winsome.

Well, you know, when I went to Concordia College and I had an incredible experience. It's a great place. And they have a great teacher education program. I wanted to be a high school teacher. And I told them the one thing that I think you should change is that when we graduated, those of us that were going into the teaching and preaching ministry got calls into sacred vocations. Everybody else got a job. And we've told young people for decades, 'It's great that you have a passion in biology or chemistry or engineering, but if you really want to serve Jesus, you have to give that up and be a pastor.' And we need pastors, and we need teachers, and we need missionaries. But what we really need is to send 31,000 graduates into the workplace, people that know how to take the gospel into the workplace. We're not going to change the world by crowding into our churches on Sunday morning. We need to do that because we need to be inspired, we need to be filled with spirit. But then we need to take that into the workplace where we spend the majority of our time. We're not going to change the country or the world if we don't change the workplace. And so what we've wanted our students to believe is that every single one of them that's going into engineering or computer science or cyber security has been called by God into a sacred vocation. And that their role is to be the best computer scientist that they can be and reflect who Jesus is through that and in that way spread the gospel. That's the most important thing I believe that we need to do is to change that whole thinking. Yes, we need pastors, teachers, and missionaries, but we've got to impact the workplace. And so students need to know how to leave here and they need to know how to take the gospel into whatever workplace God has called them to. I come out of the Lutheran tradition and it was Martin Luther who said every vocation is equally honoring in God's eyes. The Bible talks about how God takes care of us. Well, 95% of how he takes care of us is through other people. It's through the nurses that help us be healthy. It's through the teachers who help us learn. It's through the engineers who help us make the world a better place in a myriad of ways. God takes care of us mainly through other people. I think he directly intervenes frequently, but I think most of how he takes care of us is through other people. It's the farmer who grows the food. It's the trucker who puts it on the truck and gets it to the grocery stores. That's how we eat. And if everybody approached it that way, we'd live in a different world.

That's a great question. And when people ask me about leadership, I believe that the number one characteristic that needs to be developed in leaders is vision. It's absolutely the number one thing. Leaders have to see the future. They have to see how we can make the future better than what it is today. And then the second way to answer that question is, when did Christians ever get scared of growth? I'm fascinated with the growth of the early Christian church. I read books on it constantly. And it all started in the book of Acts, right? 3,000 were added and 5,000 were added and another thousand were added. The growth of the early Christian church, I believe, is because those 12, those 11, and then Paul, those people who had that direct revelation, who spent time with Jesus, were so connected to who he was, and they were able to reflect who he was in such a powerful way that the church grew exponentially against all odds, right? They had no political power. They had no military power. They had no financial resources. All they had was Pentecost and the indwelling of the Spirit and that direct contact. They saw how big Jesus looked at this world. And the fact that it grew like it did and then it grew at a time when there was never a better way to juxtapose who Jesus was from who the Romans were. The Romans were about power and control and abuse and it's everything for me. And Jesus saw everything from a servant's perspective and putting the needs of others in front of your own and that's what attracted. In the early Christian, in the first century, the Romans would put deformed babies out on the outskirts of town to be devoured or freeze to death because it wasn't worth taking care of somebody that had those kinds of needs. They asked the emperor in 250, I think 250 AD of Rome, 'Why is this thing growing so fast and why can't you stop it?' He said, 'These Christians, these people don't just care about their own poor, they care about our poor. They don't care about their own handicapped kids, they care about ours. They go out there and take these kids and bring them into their homes and raise them as their own. It's irresistible. What they're doing is irresistible.' And so we do see things in terms of what God can do because it far surpasses anything that we could envision. Now, we had a good idea when we got here. We had learned some things that we thought could flip this thing. You know, we hadn't raised tuition in 17 years. We put $2 billion into the campus. We haven't raised tuition in 17 years. And our students take out less debt than the average state university student. And so we had learned some things we thought would work. We could have never predicted this. And I think as long as we stay rooted in the scripture and in the gospel message and as long as that becomes our primary responsibility, God's going to continue to bless us. And so it does become, people are out here joking about it being Mueller math. But it does become contagious. Yeah. Most people sit around at their jobs every day and point out all the things that are not very good. And there are other people and it's only a few that are always thinking about not how they are but how they could be. And those are the people you got to get into your organization.

Some of our best ideas were ideas we didn't do. You know, and yes, we made mistakes and we've done some things that haven't worked. Absolutely everybody does. We live in a fallen world. Things aren't perfect. But you've got to embrace those failures because every single failure gets you closer to a success. And so yeah, there are things that we've done that haven't worked. But you rebound quickly and you just keep going. I have a number of major meetings that we use to run the university. We have what we call a process meeting once every couple weeks. There are 350 people in the room. Every single area of the university is represented. The academic area, the marketing area, the technology area, the security area, everybody is represented in that room. And we have a very set agenda, and then we always come out of that hour and a half meeting with two new things we need to work on. Two new things that we need to go out and research, and we need to come back in 2 weeks with maybe we could do this. The world's changing so fast, the economy's changing so fast that we have to stay focused on where the economy's going, where the jobs are going to be, because we've got to create people that can access those employment opportunities that are opportunities of the future, not 50 years ago. One of the great things about the university is that 80% of our programs now have been created in the last 10 years. So, they're new, they're modern. We have 22 advisory boards, 800 companies on those advisory boards, because they want access to our graduates. But what we need to use them for is to make sure we understand, I mean, the chip manufacturing industry's blowing up in Arizona. We have a great relationship with TSMC, and we are going to be a major player in developing their talent moving forward. But it's that connectivity that allows us to understand how to get really great students, really students who are graduates with great potential into the most important industries in the state, so that we can have an impact. One of the things that we haven't done is get enough of our people into Washington, D.C. And we need to do a much better job of that. I go there frequently, and we need those offices that are on the hill, representatives, senators, you walk into those offices and that front person needs to be a GCU grad. And so we're really focused on getting as many young people who are interested in political science and government and want to go to law school, getting them into positions of influence in the governmental area, too.

It's, you know, I meet with 27 public school superintendents three times a year. I meet with private school superintendents. I meet with charter school superintendents. We have 26,000 students in our education program. We're the largest producer of teachers in the world. We're going to be the largest producers of counselors and social workers in the world. We need to populate public schools and all schools with people who come from a Christian worldview perspective so we can get the gospel back into the public school system. You know, it's really not hard as long as you're willing to do the hard work because there's an unbelievable need. You know, I've got letters from the superintendent of the New York public school district that thanks me profusely, us at the university, for the work that we're doing to help them fulfill their teacher shortage. How ironic is that? We're getting those same kind of responses from the major public school districts throughout the country. As long as you're willing to sit with them and ask them what it is they need, how they can move their organization forward, uncovering the need is not hard. There's 27 superintendents. They've got school teacher shortages, too. And I said, 'You know, we have hundreds of kids that graduate every year that want to work here.' And they had a great experience here, but you guys have the same thing. You got kids that loved their experience at your high school. They love the community that they work in. They'd love to teach for you. We created what we call a 360 program where they identify the kids that want to be teachers. If they send them to us, within 18 months, we'll have them back to them as paraprofessionals, and with another 18 months, we'll have them back to them as full-time teachers. And so, we've got like six schools now, six school districts that are doing that with us. Eventually, we'll have hundreds of school districts that will do that with us. They were sitting in a meeting one time, and they were complaining about the fact that the morale is low because teachers can't use their planning periods to do planning. They got to substitute teach. And I was listening to them talk, and I thought, 'We got 25,000 really smart kids on this campus. I guarantee if we give them a little bit of training, they can go into a third-grade classroom and substitute teach. What do you guys pay?' And they said, '175 bucks a day.' I said, 'You know what? You can't make that at Chick-fil-A.' And so, we've got now a process where we're taking kids who want to work for school districts while they're here, even if they're not going to be a teacher. But, we give them a little bit of training, and they substitute teach. And they're making 175 bucks a day doing that. It supplements their education here. But, a lot of schools they go into, these kids have never even met a college student. So, think about the impact they're making in addition to the fact that they're making really good part-time income. They're having a professional experience. That connecting education to the workplace is going to be huge going forward. We're trying to get all of our kids in engineering and business and finance and accounting internships sometimes as early as our sophomore year. But for sure by the time they are junior because so many times they're getting hired by those companies where they do their internships. But connecting the world of work and the world of school and making it more integrated is something that is going to happen in the future.