Three decades inside higher ed. One question now.

I've spent my whole career inside higher education — not consulting about it from the outside, but doing the work.

I started in 1991 as a resident assistant, found my way into a registrar's office, and got hooked on the systems behind how institutions actually function. I spent years on the vendor side helping colleges run their student and data systems, then came back inside to lead student information systems, then business intelligence and information services, and today I serve as Chief Data Officer at National Louis University.

That arc matters because it's the throughline of everything I do: I've been the person responsible for making new technology actually work inside a real institution — with real faculty, real students, real budgets, and real politics. Not the demo. The deployment.

Now the question in front of all of us is AI. And I think higher ed is approaching it the way it approaches a lot of change — with a mix of fear, hype, and committees. I want something better than that.

My goal is simple to say and hard to do: help higher education survive and thrive through the AI shift. For the institutions that can adapt, that means getting genuinely ready — governance, data, people, strategy — and building tools that make the work better, not just flashier. For the ones that won't make it, it means an honest, graceful path so students land somewhere good rather than stranded.

I care about this because I've watched institutions change students' lives, and because the ones with the fewest resources are the ones most at risk of being left behind by AI. They're the ones I most want to help.

That's why I founded eleved.ai — to do this work at more institutions than one job ever could.