Do Good Right where you are

At Do Good Talks in Scottsdale, Arizona, we were thrilled to have Brian Mueller as one of our speakers.

Brian is the president of Grand Canyon University, the largest private university in America. They now have 10 distinct colleges. They are the Colangelo College of Business, the College of Doctoral Studies, the College of Education, the College of Engineering and Technology, the College of Arts and Media, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the College of Nursing and Health Care Professions, the College of Natural Sciences, the College of Theology, and Honors College.

That is an amazing array of disciplines, and all of them are offered at the same tuition GCU charged more than ten years ago!

You read that correctly: GCU has not raised their tuition in more than ten years, and they have no plans to raise it any time soon. That may be one of the reasons for its incredible growth.

In the fall of 2025, there will likely be about 27,000 students on campus and 100,000 online. In 2008, when president Mueller arrived, there were just 900 students on campus.

No matter how you look at those numbers, that is a phenomenal amount of growth. How did it all happen?

Not a new school, but…

Grand Canyon College was founded in 1949, so it has been around for 76 years. Some of those years were great. Based on what was being taught, all of them were good. This is not a story about a school where the leadership didn’t care and no one was making an effort.

Quite the opposite, those who were leading Grand Canyon College were working hard and praying even harder for their school to grow. Opening with about 100 students in 1949, Grand Canyon continued to grow through the 1950s and reached a student population of 400 in 1960.

Enrollment continued to increase through the mid-60s and early 70s, as more and more military veterans who had served during the war in Viet Nam took advantage of the GI Bill. Additionally, the College was adding new disciplines, including nursing, sciences, music, and fine arts. It even became a University! All of that is good.

The primary problem for the school, it seems, was its location.

Many people think of “Ivy League” schools when they picture a college campus. Grand Canyon was not located in an environment like that. Far from it.

The school was in a tough neighborhood. Think crime, drugs, gangs, and an overworked Phoenix police force. Although I don’t have data to support my theory, I believe many students opted out of attending Grand Canyon because of its location.

Just across the street from the school there were brothels, bars, and a lot of police activity.

Let’s get out of town…

As the school struggled financially, they began to look for a buyer. They found one in an entrepreneurial business group that became known as Grand Canyon Education, Inc.

I’ll skip all that business stuff for now, but it brought a lot of fresh capital to the school. It also brought in Brian Mueller as president.

Still, growing a Christian university in their neighborhood was going to be very, very challenging. Everyone in the Phoenix area who was watching GCU knew two things: the school was going to do well; the school’s growth was going to be dampened by its location.

And so it was that suitors came from Scottsdale, and from Paradise Valley, and from other safer and wealthier towns in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

GCU turned them down, saying in effect, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Why? Because they believed God had put them there for a reason, and they needed to stay there to fulfill that mission. This wasn’t some strategic business plan, it was a “let’s do good” plan. Maybe it would help with business. If it did, that was a bonus.

Blooming where you are planted

In short, in 2025 GCU is winning the battle for hearts and minds and good in the neighborhood where they are.

They haven’t done that through gentrification. You’ll see that sometimes, and it can make a neighborhood look better, but it generally only displaces the poor people — it doesn’t help many of them.

GCU is winning the battle through transformation. You can see that in a brothel that is now closed and is a building on campus used for good. You can see it in education for the neighborhood kids. GCU offers free tutoring and full-tuition scholarships to K-12 students in the area!

They’ve transformed families by hiring from the neighborhood, and then giving free college tuition to the families of every worker. And they’ve transformed the area through partnerships with schools and businesses — and even the Phoenix police department.

The education available at GCU is first class. The transformation of the 27th Avenue corridor is world class.

President Mueller told the audience at Do Good Talks that the transformation of the area, which continues, is the thing that moves him the most. The incredible growth of the school takes second place to the even more incredible changes they can see in West Phoenix.

He loves the numbers which are great, but he loves the school’s impact in a whole different way: it is good.

Where are you?

Listening to Brian Mueller talk about GCU and its impact on those around it is inspiring. We’ll get that talk online in the next couple of weeks (at least part of it), so you can experience his joy and enthusiasm.

The question, though, is this: are you redeeming your neighborhood? Either the one where you live or the one where you work?

It could very well be that part of your purpose in life is to be a transformer of neighborhoods and people.

So don’t make “running away” your default, make a commitment to those around you your default. Emulate the actions and compassion of GCU. Perhaps, like them, growth will be a byproduct of the good you do.

Don’t do it for the growth, though, do it for the good. It’s in you.