William Hardin, Dean, FIU College of Business
Invest: spoke with William Hardin, dean of the FIU College of Business, about how the college is shaping programs that reflect Miami’s global strengths while preparing students for a rapidly evolving, tech-infused business landscape. With 10,000 students from 87 countries, FIU is integrating AI and data literacy across disciplines while emphasizing the soft skills that underpin leadership. “The best advice for students is to stay curious, focus on problem-solving, and continually expand what they know so they can adapt as AI evolves,” Hardin said.
What guides your decisions about which programs to launch or to expand?
We’re a large college with real scale, which gives us the ability in Miami to bring a lot of talent to our students. With 9,500-10,000 students and being the largest producer of master’s graduates in Florida, our goal is to offer a portfolio of programs that reflects both industry needs and the strengths of our market.
Over the last few years, we’ve added programs in areas like cybersecurity, data analytics, and AI, with some majors reaching capacity instantly, but we’re also seeing strong demand in traditional disciplines that are infused with technology, such as a master’s in marketing. Miami’s role as a logistics hub has made our logistics programs especially successful — not every university can run those programs effectively. You need sufficient scale and a critical mass of companies. In South Florida, we have thousands of logistics-related corporations, so it’s easy to align their skill needs with our students.
Going forward, we’re looking at offerings across tech-infused fields while also developing concentrations in areas like wealth management that are particularly relevant to South Florida. This is a global wealth aggregation market, similar in some ways to Singapore or key cities in the Middle East. That creates demand for programs that combine technical knowledge with a deep understanding of people, families, and the psychology of money. Wealth management is less about pure quantitative skills and more about interpersonal skills, family dynamics, and long-term stewardship across generations. That intersection of psychology, technology, and business is where we see exciting opportunities.
As an international university, what initiatives is FIU undertaking to attract a growing population of international students?
In the College of Business, we have about 165 full-time faculty members representing 42 countries. That global composition is a major asset in attracting students because they see faculty who understand their regions and markets. We’re seeing particularly strong interest from Africa, for example, as countries like Nigeria and Senegal continue to grow.
Our student body now represents 87 countries. That diversity helps create an environment where prospective students can easily picture themselves living, studying, and working here. Miami has become a global megacity, attracting people from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. When students arrive, they find communities, cultures, and languages that feel familiar, which makes the transition much easier. We leverage that reality in our recruitment by emphasizing that you can come here from almost anywhere in the world and feel at home walking down the street, in our classrooms, or in local businesses.
Historically, the college had over 70 formal partnerships with universities around the world. We’ve intentionally narrowed that number to focus on those relationships that generate the most activity and value — quality over quantity. In places like Panama and Jamaica, we now have substantial networks of FIU College of Business graduates in leadership roles. Those alumni networks are powerful advocates for FIU and help make recruitment more straightforward. In many markets, we’re benefiting from 20–30 years of investment in international business education. People already know who we are and what we do.
How do you envision AI changing business education and the way you prepare future business leaders?
AI creates value in at least two ways. First, it boosts individual productivity. On the operations side, for example, I have people who can now complete in a day what might previously have taken a week. They understand what data they need, how to aggregate it, and how to use AI tools to build dashboards and feedback loops. That’s a productivity enhancement at both the individual and institutional level.
The challenge is how organizations actually harness those gains. Companies are trying to figure out how to capture that extra capacity while also building systems and cultures that embed AI into their operations in a responsible way. In highly regulated sectors like banking, leaders are using AI to update financial and risk models almost continuously, but they must do so within legal and regulatory frameworks designed to protect consumers.
We’re also seeing the emergence of AI-first companies — organizations built from day one around the efficiencies AI can deliver. They don’t have legacy systems or cultures to unwind, which can make them more disruptive compared with established players. I think we’ll see a lot of productivity gains among midsize and smaller businesses as well. Entrepreneurs can use AI tools to turn data into actionable information without being formal data scientists, as long as they know what questions they want to answer and what data they need.
From an educational standpoint, our job is to teach students how to think critically about data, technology, and problem-solving. They don’t all need to be machine learning engineers, but they do need to understand how to frame problems, identify the right data, and apply AI intelligently. One of the most honest things I’ve heard from a senior executive is that no one really knows exactly what AI will look like in five years, but we know we’ll get there quickly. The best advice for students is to stay curious, focus on problem-solving, and continually expand what they know so they can adapt as AI evolves.
What kinds of partnerships is FIU’s College of Business pursuing, and how do these collaborations benefit students and research?
The university has a broad portfolio of partnerships, including major initiatives in cybersecurity. There’s an entire unit devoted to that area, supported by national funding, including from the Department of Defense. The College of Business benefits from that expertise by embedding cybersecurity risk management into our MBA program and offering a stand-alone master’s program in the field.
On the AI side, many of our private- and public-sector partners are still trying to understand what AI will mean for their operations. We work with them on strategy, helping them think through how to use the data they already collect, what new data they should gather, and which tools can help them become more effective and efficient. One example is a major government organization we’re helping to reimagine how they use their data to answer increasingly complex questions, even though their staff is not traditionally data specialists.
We also conduct research with direct policy implications. A recent study on septic tanks in Miami-Dade County is a good example. There are about 120,000 residential units on septic systems, which means they’re not connected to the water and sewer network. Long before residents see flooding in their backyards, rising water tables can compromise groundwater quality. Our research showed how that creates significant environmental and public health risks, not just locally but across Florida, where roughly 27% of residential units rely on septic tanks.
In that project, Miami-Dade helped us access the necessary data, and our contribution was the analytical work and policy insight. The study has now been published and is informing discussions at the county and state levels about how to change incentives and upgrade infrastructure. That’s a good illustration of how our partnerships allow us to combine data, analytics, and policy to serve the broader community and give our students exposure to real-world, high-impact challenges.
