4 min read July 2023 — George Hanbury, president and CEO of Nova Southeastern University, sat down with Invest: to discuss a busy 2022 and 2023, projects in the pipeline for greater economic impact and challenges within higher education. “We are not your small, local college,” he said. “We are an international, doctoral research university with regional campuses and a major economic force with an economic impact of almost $6 billion.”
What highlights have defined Nova Southeastern University in the past year and how do they reflect higher education today?
NSU’s 23,000 students come from 115 different countries and represent 62 religions. It has been a very productive year. We are the youngest university in the nation in the Top 200 National Doctoral Research Universities as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, and by 2025, we aspire to be in the Top 100. Our capital campaign is poised to reach $1 billion by 2025, and we are 86% of the way there. About $500 million of these funds will come from philanthropy and $500 million from externally funded research. We are the largest private employer in Broward County. With HCA’s on-campus employees, the expansion that will double its footprint, our future Comprehensive Cancer Treatment Center, and a hotel/conference center, NSU is close to a $5.5-$6 billion economic impact on the state of Florida. We sold $150 million of bonds to expand our health professions programs, and our first project will be a state-of-the-art simulation complex that will be open 24/7. It will include artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and volumetric holograms. These technologies will be available to each of our eight regional campuses.
What is the biggest value-add you offer to students and how do you compete with other schools?
NSU is #1 nationally in NCAA DII basketball, #1 in men’s golf, and #1 in women’s swimming. Three national championships in one semester are unheard of in any NCAA division, and next year we will be adding men’s and women’s lacrosse to our roster. Our student loan default rate is just 0.06%, compared to 10% to 15% nationally — that is one of the lowest in the nation. Our graduates are landing very, very good jobs. We are also one of only four universities in the nation to have two medical schools (DO and MD), where we plan on seeing continued expansion in the next few years. NSU will be awarding degrees to more physicians than any other university in the nation by 2025. We launched an international dental program at our Tampa Bay Regional Campus in 2022. Dentists in other countries must have licenses to practice in the United States, so we created a program to allow them to reskill. We will grow this program over the next three years to an additional 43 students per year to become the largest international dental program in the nation.
How are you addressing the industry wide challenge of declining enrollment?
This year, we saw our largest increase in undergraduate students in our history, following several years of steady growth, even during the pandemic when most universities saw sharp declines. We had so many students in our residence halls that we had to lease 400 private apartments for students to live in. We have close to 3,000 students living on campus now, out of 7,000 undergraduates. Many of our undergraduates are coming from outside of the state now. Leveraging our prestigious graduate programs, which make up 70% of our student population, has attracted the best and brightest undergraduates who wish to continue studying with us. In fact, 60% of our undergrads go on to graduate school. This is another reason our default rate is so low. If you come here knowing you want to pursue a medical, dental, or other professional degree and can maintain superb grades, instead of having to compete with 10,000 applicants, you receive direct admission. We also received two major gold-standard accreditations in 2023 in our MD college and our college of business.
What challenges is higher education facing today and how are you addressing them?
Along with the rest of the higher education sector, we are dealing with financial constraints, which is why we are aggressively pursuing our $1 billion capital campaign. We are looking to build our endowment. Because we are so young, we have not been able to build that. We are 88% to 90% tuition driven. I would love to be able to pull from our endowment, which is currently about $200 million. By 2025, I would like to see it at $300 million. As we raise the endowment, we can spend the interest earned to pay for student scholarships to make it more affordable to come to a prestigious private, not-for-profit university that is not supported by tax dollars like the state university system. This is every president’s biggest challenge. Philanthropic and research funding support from the community and the government drives educational success and thus, progress.
To what do you attribute your success?
We are the largest private not-for-profit university in Florida. Nationally, close to 100 private institutions similar to Nova Southeastern University have closed because they have not been innovative and able to meet the demands of today’s society. Our success is a testament to the innovation we have implemented and to our faculty, which are always willing to try new things. This is the second year that NSU’s Alan B. Levan | NSU Broward Center of Innovation has been open, which is wildly successful and community centric. Business leaders are realizing they can use the resources and tools at the Center as well because of our investment in advanced technology. And, we are not limited to Greater Fort Lauderdale.
What impact will your current projects have on the local community?
Nova Southeastern University is a knowledge-based industry and an economic engine. A lot of people don’t look at us like that. We are not your typical small, local college. We are an international, doctoral research university with regional campuses and a major economic impact of almost $6 billion. Our geographic area has five educational institutions and one hospital, which is located on our campus in Davie. We need to connect the activity centers via light rail to accommodate all the traffic we are generating. We are working closely with the county to ensure that this will be included in the future.
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