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Higher Education in Florida
Saint Leo University's Captain Kirk
Based in a tiny town in Pasco County, Saint Leo University operates more like an entrepreneurial venture than a traditional university.
Saint Leo is “way ahead of the rest of the world on online education,” says Ed Moore, president of Independent Colleges & Universities |
Kirk, meanwhile, keeps pushing new ideas. As the military downsizes, he foresees fewer active soldiers, but more veterans seeking degrees. Saint Leo is developing a veterans support center that will offer services to vets in person and online. In its effort to step up its partnerships with businesses to develop degree and training programs for employees, the university is working on a curriculum with Newport News Shipbuilding.
“The classroom is being transformed,” Kirk says. “The business model, whether its public higher education or private not-for-profit higher education, is being upset in a lot of different ways, and so we have to be aggressive, innovative, entrepreneurial and agile in responding to all of this. The notion that a business model, any business model in any industry, is going to endure for decades and decades is obsolete thinking and very dangerous thinking.”
Saint Leo University’s new Donald R. Tapia School of Business Value Proposition |