Rubén Harris sat down with Dr. Mark Milliron, President of National University, on campus in San Diego, to talk about running a university where the competition isn't other institutions. It's poverty. Mark grew up in a family of nine kids with 25 foster kids rotating through the house, bused tables to pay his way through Mesa Community College, earned two degrees at Arizona State and a doctorate at UT Austin, then built a career that spans the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an early board seat at Western Governors University, corporate work at Oracle, and the chairmanship of the Trellis Foundation. Today he leads National University, which serves 130,000 learners a year. Almost all of them are working students, half are parents, half of undergrads are military-affiliated, and the average undergrad is 32. National calls them Anders: students and parents, students and employees, students and deployed. If you ask them to choose between their ands, you lose. We get into the Wingman initiative that aims to put an AI Agent next to every employee and student, why grad students were the original AI agents, the four rings that replace a chief AI officer, the RAISE 5 initiative, the framework that codes every assignment for how much AI students can use, and the story of a faculty member who threw his computer out a second-story window and later opened his email for the first time to save one student's degree. Learn more about National University here: https://www.nu.edu/ 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐖 𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐒 (key moments and quotes) Competition is poverty. "My competitors aren't institutions. My competition's poverty." Higher ed shares ideas, which Mark jokingly calls the CASE method: copy and steal everything. His partners in common cause include WGU, UMGC, and Miami Dade through the Presidents' Forum. Anders, not students. National's learners are students and parents, students and employees, students and deployed. "If you ask them to choose between their ands, you're gonna lose." Designing for Anders is a feature, not a bug. Put AI on purpose. The worst thing to do with AI is "we're going to do AI." AI is not a business tool. It's universal infrastructure, and it only works if it's attached to mission. The Wingman initiative. Every employee and every student gets an AI wingman. The insight came from the Gates Foundation: most students who leave do so in good academic standing, because life happened. The fix isn't the curriculum. It's navigation. Even 30-year veterans of NU discover resources they never knew existed, and no single human can hold them all. A wingman can. Grad students were the original AI agents. Every graduate professor in America has been using agents for hundreds of years. They were called grad students. Now it's grad students plus AI, and the game moves toward collective intelligence. Use student data for the student. Institutions use data to prove their worth to accreditors. Mark's position: process it in near real time to help the student make a better choice and go in a better direction, so personalized education isn't reserved for people with half a million dollars. Get grounded, get real, get going. Then try, test, tune. Every bet gets instrumented. Bad data can't trigger a culture of blame. "A culture of blame will kill you. It's gotta be a culture of wonder." RAISE5. The Rules for AI in Scholastic Environments: five levels, from no AI at all to deep agentic collaboration, coded onto every assignment. When the law school rolled it out, 95% of assignments were level five, no AI. Then the conversation started. No chief AI officer. A whole-of-institution AI council built on four rings: student experience at the center, academics and operations, infrastructure, and governance. The leaders over all of it are jokingly called the Lord of the Rings. More than 150 people now lead AI initiatives across NU. Steve and Gina. A tenured faculty member threw his newly installed computer out a second-story window. Years later he knocked on Mark's door, closed the blinds, and asked to have his email opened for the first time, because a student fleeing domestic violence had emailed him her final assignments. She walked across the stage as a nurse. Novel to normal. Email, microcomputers, the internet, and now AI. Every technology follows the same curve, and Mark has seen this play before. Innovators need data, the early majority needs evidence, and the late majority won't move without playbooks. Educational malpractice. Not teaching students the AI of their discipline is putting your head in the sand. So is not teaching durable skills. Both are failing to prepare people for the world as it is. The market nobody sees. Less than 20% of higher ed is the full-time, on-campus, non-working student. 43 million Americans have some college and no credential, and the vast majority left in good academic standing. "If we'll take 1%, you can have the rest." The 280Z. Mark's dream car couldn't fit his 6'4" frame, and the lesson became his philosophy of fit: there are students for whom traditional education is perfect, and there are Anders who need a different model. Better with, not better than.
