Transcript: Changing Higher Ed Podcast  218 – How Higher Ed Can Use Technology to Transform Branding and Marketing with Nuno Fernandes

Introduction

[00:00:30] Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. My guest today is Nuno Fernandes, President of American Public University System. For those of you who don’t know APUS, APUS is comprised of American Public University and American Military University and is the number one provider of higher education to the U. S. military and veterans, with a 25 percent market share of the military student.

It has students from 50 countries, and over 141 alums from more than 100 countries. Nuno doesn’t have a traditional higher ed background. He comes from business and sees things from a business perspective. Something more presidents are delving into more deeply. He’s a big proponent of providing access to higher education for learners of all backgrounds, regardless of their income and location in the world. And he joins me today to talk about how higher ed is changing through the use of AI and other technologies to remain affordable and relevant to today’s and tomorrow’s students.

Nuno, welcome to the show.

[00:01:37] Nuno Fernandes: Thank you very much, Drumm. Pleasure being here.

[00:01:39] Drumm McNaughton: It’s my pleasure to have you here. You are the president at the American Public University System. You’ve been there for a while. You do some incredible stuff there. Tell us a little bit about your background, if you would, I’m fascinated to know more.

[00:01:56] Nuno Fernandes: Absolutely. Well, I’ve been the president of APUS since September of 2022, so a bit less than two years. I’ve been in education for almost 12 years now, but, my background is, it is kind of interesting. I was born in Portugal on the other side of the world, in a very small village in a very small family. My grandparents they lived in a very small village of 200 people and they did not know how to read or write, so they were farmers. And my parents were actually the first people in my family, that small community that went to college and that graduated, so they were first generation.

My father became a lawyer, my mother became a teacher, and I always go back to that story because I could see firsthand how education transformed the life of my family, even before I was born, right? I always call this the butterfly effect. It’s one of these things that happens in your life that completely changes it, but that you didn’t really control. So when my parents decided to go to college, even before I was born, they completely changed my life. And that’s the power of education, it changes the life of one generation, but it changes also the life of the next generations,

and I’ve started, my career working for very large German company called Bosch. You might have heard the name. I’ve worked in consumer goods globally for 11 years. Spent some time in the UK, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, Columbia, a bit all over the world. And, and about 15 years ago, I moved to the U. S., working for Bosch and around 2013, executive recruiter approached me that they were looking for a CMO for a global education company called Illumino, but until that point, I really never thought about education as a service that could be marketed or promoted.

I always had a lot of respect for education, but I never imagined being, let’s say, professionally involved with it. But then, I went back to the story of my family that I just briefly shared, and how much education changed my life, and I became attracted to the idea of helping other people and other families experience the same transformation.

So I accepted the role. I’ve started as the CMO of that company, chief marketing officer. Eventually I became the president and CEO of that company, and I’d been with them for almost 10 years and that company grew to be one of the largest online program managers in the world. At our peak, we had 300,000 students and we were the pioneers in online education in many countries such as Colombia, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador. And then later South Africa, Kenya, Greece and others.

So during that period, I develop a strong sense of how education can change the life of the students just the way that changed mine and my family and it just, I just became very passionate about it. You always listen to these kind of business gurus and they say, follow your passion, that kind of thing, but I think that’s a bit silly, to be honest, because you don’t really know, you don’t really know what your passion is when you’re 18 years old or 20 years old. And and your passions might change as you grow up, right? You know, it might have a passion for sports and it might have a passion for cars that he might have passion for watches, traveling, whatever it might be, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be good at it. It doesn’t mean that you have a skill to, to be particularly good. And so I think that advice of all your passion is very shallow.

However, I have to say that I’ve discovered the passion and education when I started working with it, and I think that’s fair because when you think about the best lawyers in the world for taxes, for tax advisors, I would say they probably did not have a passion for taxes when they were growing up, but along the way they, they saw that they were good at that and then they kept learning more and, and eventually they have a passion for helping people with their tax structures and things like that.

So I think that the passion, the professional passion is something that you learn along the way, and I’ve learned to respect, higher education too, I’ve learned that delivering a great quality product and services is fundamental for the success of any university. I’ve learned about the importance of the brands. I’ve learned about the importance of having great teams. And first and foremost, I learned about the impact. I’ve been to many, many, many graduation events, and every time it feels like the first one. When you see those students across the stage and how happy they are and their families and about, the achievement that they made. Sometimes with a lot of, work and a lot of dedication, especially adult learners. It’s always very rewarding to see that. So that’s a bit about myself and my family.

[00:06:29] Drumm McNaughton: You’re making a difference in people’s lives.

[00:06:32] Nuno Fernandes: Absolutely. Or we try to, yeah.

[00:06:35] Drumm McNaughton: There’s something that’s fascinating to me about your career and besides you and I having Panama in common, because that’s where I grew up was down in the canal zone, but you spent a lot of time internationally, you spent a lot of time in corporate America.

How much of those, and we’re going to talk about higher ed, the model and how you’re changing that model at APS. But to set the stage with that, how have your skills from corporate America translated over to higher ed? You talked about a few of those already working with teams, building good teams, et cetera. But there’s a common perception in higher ed that you have to come up through the academic ranks to be a good president, and I don’t think that’s the case,

[00:07:24] Nuno Fernandes: You know, it’s a very interesting question and I’ve talked a lot about that with my colleagues and I’ve thought a lot about that. Because, in many ways, I believe my profile is not the typical profile for a university president. Now, I don’t say this to imply it is better or worse, I’m just saying it’s different.

So as you said, I spent the first half of my career working for a Fortune 500 company, managing branding, marketing, sales, product management, in a very competitive environment in the global consumer goods industry. So I’ve learned a lot of things working for that company. I’m very thankful.

But the most important lesson I’ve learned, I think, was that branding and marketing are two completely different things. And that working and nurturing the value of a brand is very strategic for any enterprise and marketing tends to be more tactical. Both are necessary, but I became a big fan of building strategies to continuously improve brand trust and brand value. And I think that no matter the industry, the product, the customer, the country, the continent, the company’s brand, it’s the single most important asset.

[00:08:32] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, they talk about Coca Cola and the valuation of Coca Cola is because of its brand

[00:08:39] Nuno Fernandes: And so it’s very hard to build brands, it’s very hard. It’s very expensive, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of talent, it takes a lot of investment. But I truly believe that building consumer trust is very, very important. That’s why brands, like you said, Coca Cola or Apple or others, there’s incredibly valid because we’ve been building this rep with their reputation for it for decades.

[00:09:03] Drumm McNaughton: Or Harvard or MIT or Princeton, you’ve got the same rock stars. I hate to use the term, but especially seeing the commercial that’s on television now about Billy Idol and rock stars, but you’ve got the same kind of rock stars for higher ed branding and positioning.

[00:09:22] Nuno Fernandes: You do. So branding, those universities, when we talk about Ivy League universities, I think they’re a different category in itself and that’s fine because they serve a very specific audience. But they are in essence, they are like luxury brands. The value of the brand is because they are exclusive, not inclusive.

The value of the brand is because they have acceptance rates of, one or two percent. The value of the brand is exactly because they’re very expensive. I assume Ferrari would not like for every person in the world to be able to drive a Ferrari, right? You’ve never, probably you’ve never seen an ad for a Ferrari. They don’t do ads. The former CEO of Lamborghini I think once said something like, I don’t do ads on TV because the people that buy my cars, they’re not home watching TV. And it’s a very specific niche and I think Ivy League universities, they work like a luxury brand. They are very exclusive brands, and that’s okay. That’s how they were created, and that’s the value that they built. Now the value is incredible because you would think that someone would graduate after paying 300,000, 400,000 for a degree, and the only reason why people do that is because they know, or they expect, that once they graduate, they’re going to get a job that allows them to pay that back, as fast as possible.

And chances are if you have a title for an Ivy League school, you probably have better chances of getting a nicer job than not, right? It’s just how it works. They understood very well, and I think they’re great case studies of protecting and developing the value of a brand.

 You never see, or it’s very rare to see marketing campaigns for Ivy league university, they don’t do marketing they do branding. They promote the brand. They want to be associated with the best minds in the world. They invite presidents, they invite prime minister, they invite writers and thinkers and intellectual people to be associated with that brand because that’s how they build the value. But they certainly are not probably so much worried about ads on Google or on Facebook, they work in different terms.

So in the first part of my career, I’ve learned that developing the value of a brand is incredibly important. Now, one example that I like, when you talk about cars, for example, if you say, well, if you take a Toyota Prius or a Porsche 911, which one is the best car? And, most people say the Porsche 911, but the true answer is that it depends. Because, both of them, won several awards. I believe last year, Porsche 911 was considered the best sports car in the world. And the Toyota Prius was considered the best city car, urban car, and both of them are great in their categories, right? And Toyota is a fantastic brand. Porsche is a fantastic brand. They’re very different. Now what you can try to do is to try to offer Toyota products, cars to the Porsche people and vice versa, because they’re not going to work.

[00:12:14] Drumm McNaughton: So let’s bring this back to higher ed so that these lessons you’ve learned outside of higher ed, the branding, the marketing, the positioning, are all critical in today’s day and age, we’ve got maybe 75 elite universities here in the U S. And those 75 don’t need to worry about their positioning, while they do worry about it, they want to make sure they maintain it, et cetera, it’s as you say, a luxury brand.

Then you’ve got the other 3,800 Institutions that are all competing with one another. When we talked a couple of days ago, we talked about, higher ed model being broken. It really hasn’t changed in a thousand years, the costs , et cetera. There was one point there that you said that was really important to me, and I thought we had to talk about that. With the costs, markets are consumer driven. It’s the buyer that makes the decision, not the seller.

[00:13:14] Nuno Fernandes: Yes, absolutely. And I think more and more. So if you think about, just go back 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and you were making the decision about where to study. Most likely you would look, within your city or within your state, what universities were physically available, close to where you live, so that you could choose the place where you wanted to go to get your degree from.

But today, that physical location is no longer that important, because you can be, anywhere and study anywhere you like, right? You can be in Miami and enroll in a university in New York or vice versa. You can enroll in a university overseas if you want, or a student in London can enroll in a university in the U. S. So that physical connection is no longer there, which transfers the power from the university to the student, because before you were limited by the options that you had around the area where you live. So the universities had the power and others might be five, six, ten universities around where you live.

But now, you can literally decide and choose from hundreds or thousands of universities. So now the power is in the student, and before, a lot of the power was in the university, but you were talking about the value of the brand and in this context of having this increased competition, where now we’re no longer just competing with five or six universities in your city or in your state, you’re now competing with thousands of universities across the United States and sometimes across the world.

Most of them offer the exact same programs, it’s just, what is the difference between MBA, University A and University B? It’s very hard to technically explain why this MBA is better than the other. Sure, you can say, well, this one is an internship, or this one is an executive program, you get to travel to Tokyo or whatever it might be. You can create differentiation, but an MBA is an MBA. A bachelor’s in marketing is a bachelor’s in marketing. So the universities. Must understand that one, they need to deeply invest and be committed to quality, to academic quality. I think that’s never going to go away. But that’s the starting point, That’s kind of the minimum viable product, you have to have good quality. Okay, that’s table stakes. But then on top of that, you have to build everything else. You have to build the services that you offer to your students.

More and more, the students say, “okay, what else can I get for the tuition that I’m paying? Do I get access to mental health services? Do I get access to career services? Do I get access to alumni community? Do I get access to coaches, professional coaches and so on and so forth?” So what else do you get for what you pay is very important on top of the good academic product, you have to have excellent services.

And then on top of that, you have to build your brand because the brand really is what’s going to build that connection, that trust with the student. And to build the brand, it’s very different than to the marketing, and this is very important because marketing is a tactical exercise needed, but branding is an exercise that you do over time, and that you do in a consistent manner, and that you repeat every day for months and years so that you can start building that trust with your students.

And in our case, we want to be recognized for offering very high quality education for a very affordable price, but also to be recognized as one of the universities that is leading this digital transformation, that is offering really next level education to the students in terms of digital experiences. And you briefly mentioned that, when you said that education has not changed for a thousand years. And I think that’s a good thing to discuss because it’s true.

If you go back to Bologna in Italy, let’s say the first university in Europe was about a thousand years ago was created. The concept was that you have a professor talking and then the students are listening. And this person had the knowledge and would transfer the knowledge to the students. The students would memorize whatever he or she was saying, usually a man back then, whatever he was saying, and then they would do an exam to show that they learned, and then they would eventually get a degree. And that concept that was invented a thousand years ago, it’s still the same today,

[00:17:34] Drumm McNaughton: Yes. And the prices have gone up Well, yeah, that’s exactly, that’s another part of the discussion. But the model, yeah, you can say now you have online education, sure, but the model is still this professor talking to the students.

[00:17:50] Nuno Fernandes: Listening and learning what the professor is saying or recommending, doing an exam and moving on. So I think that now for the first time in history, there’s a strong opportunity for higher education to evolve, to create a much better program, a much better service, that eventually will bring the costs down because technology allows to do more for less.

[00:18:15] Drumm McNaughton: It should, yes.

[00:18:16] Nuno Fernandes: And as mentioned, Drumm, higher education in the United States over the last 20 years, I think the average tuition went up 300%. Right? That’s something that is even hard to comprehend, like 300%. How can that be? That’s a lot more than inflation. And it is because there’s this vicious cycle where the students have access to easy credit, to easy funding. It’s easy to have to fund their education. So when you get access to credit, it’s not really difficult to get it, then you might not be as much as worried as it is if you would have to have a more, complicated, way of accessing.

So you have access to credit. The universities keep raising their costs. They keep raising their costs so that they transfer that cost to the tuition, then transfer that cost to the credit, and then it created the problem that we have now with this $1.7 trillion, I think it’s the value of the debt right now. So it’s a complicated topic because, higher education is becoming so expensive that for the first time, the younger generations are questioning and doubting if getting a degree is a good investment because it becomes expensive.

[00:19:26] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, they certainly are. So there’s the difference between cost and value. The value is clearly there in higher ed. We all know that the value of the degree is more than double. And then you have all of these services that you have to add to differentiate yourself. Like you said, your academic quality should be table stakes. It isn’t always, but it should be. So let’s talk about APUS because you guys are doing an incredible job with these type of things, the differentiation, the branding, the marketing. Right now, you’re the number one educator of veterans. You’ve got a 25 percent market share with the military, which are, fabulous things.

You’ve changed your branding and your marketing. Tell us about what you’ve done, because to me, that’s fascinating, because it shows how, and I don’t want to call you a smaller institution, but you’re not a traditional institution on the ground. You’ve changed these things and it’s paying off for you.

[00:20:42] Nuno Fernandes: Yeah. So APUS, is interesting because APUS is actually, when you look at individual universities, we are, I think, the 10th largest university in the United States. And if you look at just online, because we are fully online, I think we are number six right now. So we are the sixth largest university in the United States.

So as you well said, we are the number one provider of education for, the military. That’s how we started 32 years ago. So it’s part of our DNA and we’re very proud of that. We have, market share about 25%. That means that one out of every four active military students is enrolled with us and we’re very proud of that.

We’re also very proud of being the number one educator of veterans in the U S with a much smaller participation rate, because the market is a lot more fragmented. We are, very veteran friendly.

We have a special tuition for veterans, which is something that is not very common. So we have a three tiered price. We have a price for active duty, we have a tuition for veterans, and then we have a tuition for non-military / civilian students. So we recognize the veterans and the active duty with special tuition, but we also offer and extend that tuition to their families. So not only to the spouses, but to the extended families, the mother, the father, the sister, the brother, the kids.

They can all have access to that preferred tuition if they are in a military family or in a veteran family. But at the same time, APUS is very committed to quality, and I truly believe that we are building, programs that offer a great value for the tuition we charge.

So if you compare, for example, what I just said that in the last 20 years, the tuition has increased 300%. APUS for the same period of time increase their tuition about 15%, so 20 times less. 20 times less. And we are committed to our cause, which is to offer high quality affordable education. We are fully accredited by HLC and we now started this as part of our strategy, what we call this global digital journey, which is to create the next evolution of the online model. So the online model has been around for, let’s say, 30 years, plus, minus. APUS has been one of the pioneers, in fact, of online education in the United States. And that was very much driven by the need to provide the military a vehicle, a way that they could continue their studies when they were deployed or when they were working. So online at APUS started as a way to serve the military, but we were one of the first ones, we’re one of the pioneers. But the online model is now about 30 years old, right? So we start asking ourselves, okay, what’s next? What is next for online?

And I believe that what’s next is this digital transformation inside the classroom that will occur with technology. Because now for the first time we have access to technologies that will be able to significantly increase the experience of the student, and the faculty, inside the classroom for the first time. And I’m talking specifically about AI tools. So we believe that there’s going to be the next evolution of education, we’re calling it digital education. And we have rebranded, American Public University is becoming a digital university that is fully committed on delivering the 21st century education experience to our students.

And why is that? Why is that? That’s a good question. The answer is the students that we have, or every university, I think, but in our case, our students, they are daily surrounded by incredible digital experiences in everything, in their daily lives. They shop online, they watch movies online, they listen to music online, they do banking online, they get their taxis, shared drives online, some people date online, some people do their, health checkups online and so on and so forth.

So more and more, the digital experience is becoming just a normal part of life. So when you are completely surrounded by incredible digital experiences in your daily lives, when you come to the university, you’re going to expect nothing less, right? You’re going to expect to have the same level of quality, in terms of experiences, that you have in everything else in your life.

We started this rebranding effort, that, by the way, the slogan, which I really like, it’s called “Digital by Nature, Human by Design”, which I really like it because it really tells you what it is. We want to be fully digital, but we don’t want to miss the human component. In fact, I think we want to increase it, we want to make it more visible. I think that the new technologies will allow for faculty to be a lot more efficient and to dedicate themselves to the things that they really like doing, which is teaching and creating content and be able to support the students and to mentor them. And technology will allow all the admin tasks that most of the times they also need to do, they will go away because technology will be able to do that for them.

 For example, if you think a student on the West Coast on a Friday night, it’s now 7 p. m. and he or she has a question, right? But it’s 7 p. m. on the West Coast. It’s 10 p. m. on the East Coast, and the student is going to post some question on the forum, on the chat.

Most likely, traditional online model, it’s going to be, at least 24 hours, if not 48 hours, if not more than that, until Monday morning, until that person receives an answer. And I don’t think that makes sense because in this time and age, you should receive some sort of answer immediately. And now for the first time, we have these technologies that allow to augment, to improve the experience inside the classroom while enhancing the human factor.

So with technology, if a student has a question, we can have virtual tutors that provides some sort of answer that then can be validated by a real faculty human, but you get that support 24/7.

By the way, you can do that in any language. We’ve deployed last year a tool, it’s an app that provides mental health support for all our students 24 7 in 25 languages. So all our students have access to that tool for mental health support. It’s a peer to peer tool, also with AI support. It’s anonymous, you can get support in real time, and imagine if we were to do that without technology, if you wanted to provide 24 7 support

[00:27:08] Drumm McNaughton: Couldn’t do it.

[00:27:09] Nuno Fernandes: to 90, 000 students in 25 languages. for joining us. I don’t know how many people would have to hire, but I’m going to say 500, 600, right? So it would be impossible.

So technology allows to do more for less, but we shouldn’t be afraid of it because a lot of times there’s this confusion and we say technology will drive less quality, technology will take away the human factor, but I think it’s the exact opposite. And that’s, in fact, validated in everything that we saw over the last 20 years.

So to give you an example outside education, you probably remember just not long ago, let’s say 10 or 15 years ago, if you wanted to watch a movie, you go to Blockbuster, right? And then you get your popcorn and you’d pay $10, and you would, you would have to return the movie the day after, otherwise you’d have to pay a fee.

So for $10, you would watch one DVD and then you would have to return it the day after. So today, for $10, you can get a monthly Netflix subscription, and you can watch as many movies, as many series as you want, all day long. So clearly it’s a much better product. That’s why Netflix thrive and Blockbuster is no longer with us.

[00:28:18] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.

[00:28:19] Nuno Fernandes: But so allows to do more for less, and I think that in education is going to be the exact same thing that technology will allow to do more for less; more services, more support, more quality, and hopefully for a lower tuition. I think that lowering the tuition in the United States is something that universities should be considering very seriously because otherwise, a lot of them will have a lot of problems in the future.

[00:28:45] Drumm McNaughton: Well, we’re seeing those problems already with the mergers, going out of business, etc. It’s more supply than there is demand at this point. And so I’m curious integrating AI into the classroom. I can see it working very well. You’ve got faculty members who can monitor the AI responses, et cetera. It gets the students what they need more quickly. From a mental health perspective, I’m a little bit more, skeptical, I guess is probably a good way to do it. Because yes, if you’ve got all the tools loaded into the AI, it can certainly help, but there’s usually the need for the human intervention with that.

How do you work that?

[00:29:33] Nuno Fernandes: Yeah, so the tool that I described is a peer to peer tool. So there are humans there at all times, and they are fully trained. And this is a company from London that works with, probably, 300 or 400 universities around the world, and they train people around the world to provide peer support.

So they always have real people inside the app to provide real support. However, if for any reason, you start chatting or you have some challenge and there’s nobody available at that time, you’re going to get some sort of answer. But eventually, at most times you have, peer support from a real person.

[00:30:09] Drumm McNaughton: Okay. That makes sense.

[00:30:11] Nuno Fernandes: The app is also trained for escalations. So, God forbid if something would say something terrible, I’m about to do something terrible, that immediately escalates to a real person with the phone call. So it’s also trying to provide that kind of escalation. But, yes, there are, people, at all times inside the app..

You know, AI, another aspect that I think, very similar to the Netflix one, by the way, or to Spotify. I remember in 2016, I was working on a project with the Ivy League University, I don’t want to say which one, but, one of the big ones. And back then they told me that per course that they were doing per course, I think they told me that they were spending about 150,000 on video production per course. They were doing these high quality videos. This was 2016. So this is eight years ago. And today, AI will allow you to produce videos that are probably better than any video they could do it for 50,000. For free.

[00:31:11] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. And you can put president, Biden in the video if you want to.

[00:31:14] Nuno Fernandes: Yes. Well, that’s the problem is deep fakes and certainly a lot of ethical things will need to be sorted out, but if you see the quality of the videos that are being put out there by these AI tools. I saw one, on YouTube, which was a Formula One car being filmed from inside looking as if it was the driver going at high speed. And I generally, honestly could not tell that it was not true. It’s just the quality was so high. So imagine that for academic purposes, the quality that you can make to offer your students a better service for a lower cost.

[00:31:50] Drumm McNaughton: Of course. Of course.

Your rebranding effort. When did you get started with that and what kind of results are you seeing?

[00:31:59] Nuno Fernandes: Yes, we started doing the strategic analysis and the strategic positioning about one year ago. We had a group, a very senior group of people working on that with me. We’ve dedicated a lot of time and effort to try to really build something that we all believe would be meaningful and impactful and bold. We also work with a world class branding agency that was helping us with the visuals and also with reviewing the strategy. But that initial strategic time was about six months, then we went into the design concept of how the brand would look like and the messages. And that was probably three more months and then we’ve launched officially, I think April 19th was the day. A group of us went to New York, we were on Times Square with an ad, which was pretty nice to see, announcing, the new brand. And there’s been a lot of excitement, internally and externally. The month that we’ve launched the new kind of refreshed look and feel, we usually receive a certain number of followers per month on social media. That particular month, that number was multiplied by 10. So we’re getting 10 more, 10 more followers on social media than what we usually get. The volume of traffic on our website has increased exponentially. The interest on, programs and the university has increased exponentially. So we’re very pleased but more than the immediate effects, Drumm, I think that what we did was we created something that we can really work into the future that is going to be valid today. And it’s going to be valid in 10 years and in 20 years, when you built this digital journey, as we call it inside the class. That digital journey is not a marketing campaign. It’s a strategic project of how do we serve our students better? How do we continuously increase the quality? How do we continuously increase what we do for them? How do we continuously increase how we support them? How do we continuously motivate increasing the graduation rates and so on and so forth, by utilizing technology and by utilizing the incredible talent that we have. So combining these two, I think it’s a concept that’s going to be valued, for two decades, probably. So we just, we started now, but this is really the start, this is not the end point.

[00:34:20] Drumm McNaughton: course, and more website traffic, more social media traffic leads to higher enrollments. And then when you’re putting the tools in place that you are, the AI based tools, to be able to help the students more, that improves your persistence rates, that improves your retention, which allows you to increase your graduation rates. So it’s all part of a package.

[00:34:44] Nuno Fernandes: Yeah, the academic programs as they are today, I think that’s also something that is going to be transformed. I don’t want to say disrupted because it’s probably a word that is too big, but they’re going to be transformed by technology. What I mean by this is, for example, any student today that enrolls in any program, the program is exactly the same for every student.

This is valid in every university around the world, or most of them, right? That the program is the same for every student. But if you really think about it, that doesn’t really make a lot of sense in many ways because each person is different. Everyone learns in a different way. Everyone has a certain set of skills that is different. Everyone has a certain personality. Some people might like to watch videos and some other might like to read. And some students might be better at biology and others might be better at math. So why is it that the academic journey is the same for all? It’s something that, as we’ve seen in other industries, where more and more the products, they get personalized and adapted to, to the consumer, so that you maximize the experience. I think that in our case, we can maximize the academic experience, the academic journey, by adapting the programs to each student. Now, to do that can only be done with technology.

[00:36:02] Drumm McNaughton: And cycling back to one of our initial statements, “higher ed hasn’t changed in a thousand years”. Guess what? You’re changing it. It’s not one to multitudes. It’s one to one based on your consumer, your students needs and experiences.

[00:36:21] Nuno Fernandes: All we do, and I mean this sincerely, and, I think you can ask this to any person at APUS. All we do is to provide better quality and better experience for our students. That’s the only reason why we’re here, is to serve our students. There’s no other reason. Everything else comes after that.

If you provide a great experience, a great program, great quality, you remain affordable, the students are satisfied, that’s all we need to do. Now, this sounds easy, but it’s actually incredibly difficult. But that’s essentially what we need to do, is just to serve our students every day a bit better than yesterday.

You know? And, and if we have this mindset of continuous improvement, Inside the classroom, outside the classroom, supporting services, I think that the future for, for us, it’s very bright. Because it’s all about serving the student. There’s nothing else.

[00:37:18] Drumm McNaughton: Well, I think what you’re doing is at the forefront of what higher ed needs to be doing this one on one education. We started off by talking about branding, positioning, marketing, all of those things, and that’s all part of the whole piece, but it really comes down to, it doesn’t matter what you brand, et cetera. It all comes down to how you serve your student.

[00:37:43] Nuno Fernandes: That’s it. Because, it’s part of building the brand. It’s building the brand out of reputation, out of serving the students, to say, ” this university really takes care of me. This university really cares about how I’m doing. This university really cares about how I’m progressing.”

And by the way, that is human. Like I said, there is that is human by nature. You want to have that human factor. You want the student to feel supported when you have such a large population of students as we have, 90,000. By the way, 90,000 students in 50 states and in 50 countries around the world.

So the only way to serve these students appropriately is with technology. As educators we shouldn’t be afraid of innovation, we shouldn’t be afraid of technology, we should embrace it because it’s good for our students.

Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards

[00:38:29] Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. This has been a fascinating conversation for me, Nuno, thank you so much. Three takeaways for university presidents and boards.

[00:38:39] Nuno Fernandes: What we were just discussing. I think embracing technology and innovation is critical for the success of any university as we move forward. We briefly discussed today, Drumm, that the challenges that universities are facing, I think that they will not go away. If anything, they’re going to get bigger and more relevant.

Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard professor, he had this prediction, I think it was around 2010, 2011, where he said that, 50 percent of universities will eventually close. in the United States and he was obviously wrong about the timing, but I think there’s something to be said about the concept that if you don’t reinvent yourself in a time where reinvention is needed, you will have problems. So I would, recommend that everyone welcomes this new era with open arms and open minds.

[00:39:29] Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Thank you. Those are great takeaways. What’s next for you? What’s next for APUS?

[00:39:35] Nuno Fernandes: I’m the president of APUS, I’m very honored with the trust that I get from the board, the trust that I get from my colleagues, I’m very honored to have this role and to work with the team. We have a fantastic management team with really talented people that are very dedicated to the cause, that really mean well, that really care about the students and really want to do good things for them.

So my role is to keep developing APUS, to keep expanding APUS, to keep serving our students even better. And if you ask about what’s next for APUS, as I said, we are the number one educator of military and veterans, and we’re very proud of that, and we want to keep and expand that position.

That’s our DNA, but we also want to continue to expand with other audiences, either, nationally or internationally. So, we believe in our programs. We believe in our services. We have a very affordable tuition that we, as I said, that we have tried to keep us stable over the last 20 years.

And, so for us next is to continue on the path that we are, which is to reinvent ourselves continuously. This digital journey to utilize technology to better serve our students and to continue to expand with the communities we serve.

[00:40:51] Drumm McNaughton: Very good. Nuno, thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time that we get a chance to talk.

[00:40:59] Nuno Fernandes: Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.