As I close out this fiscal year and my tenure as president of CSU Global, I would like to take the opportunity to express my gratitude to the CSU System and the Board of Governors both current and past, for the amazing honor and opportunity I have been provided over the last decade to lead the institution.
Back in 2004, I made the decision to prepare for the next phase of my life to do work that would help people to help themselves so that they could in turn, help to ensure the future success of the U.S. against an increasingly competitive global landscape. I chose the industry of public higher education given its transformative power, with goals of wanting to make a difference to:
- facilitate Americans to be globally competitive through higher education that was focused on helping them to be successful in the workplace;
- prove that it was possible to have a new affordable model of higher education that provided an ROI to educational consumers in its ability to provide tangible outcomes for individuals who sought that path as a way to move themselves forward in society; and
- serve nontraditional students like my father, who many decades earlier was a First Generation student working three different part-time jobs while earning his Bachelor’s degree — taking time off just to take midterms and finals but with no other real connection to his institution nor support systems to ensure his academic success.
In the last decade as CSU Global’s president, together with invested stakeholders at the CSU System, we have accomplished those goals while providing much in service to nontraditional learners and now alumni throughout Colorado, the U.S., and the world. We have demonstrated quantitatively and qualitatively the tangible and accountable outcomes of fully online and asynchronous education, and what is possible when industry, higher education, and effective leadership collaborate in moving people forward so that they can help themselves and their families, their organizations, and their countries.
I am proud of the leaders and employees at the university who have grown and developed under my tenure and am confident that they too are equipped for their futures in our highly dynamic world. And while the organization has only played a small role in the great sea of change, I move on also knowing that the new era of informed educational consumers will have the ability to make the choices that fit their learning needs into the future. I hope that where their needs and the institution’s offerings align, they choose CSU Global – the world’s premier provider of online education.