Becky Takeda-Tinker, Ph.D., or “Dr. Becky” as we call her around the office, has been the President of CSU Global since 2010. She started with CSU Global as an instructor, and then as dean and president, helped build CSU Global into one of the fastest growing universities in the nation. Combining her passion for education and her experience in nonprofit governance and business leadership, Dr. Becky champions data-driven, technology-based solutions to facilitate workplace success for modern learners.
In part one of this two-part series, we sit down with Dr. Becky to learn about her personal motivation and inspiration for dedicating herself to education. Get an inside look at how she turned CSU Global into one of the leading online universities and how she plans to keep it that way, while expanding, for years to come.
In part two we discuss the future of online education and the international influence CSU Global, and Dr. Becky’s leadership, is having in modern education.
CSU Global: Your education is in finance, economics, and organization & management. You were in business and private equity before moving into higher education. What inspired your career change?
BTT: After reaching my personal and professional goals in my business career, I spent some time contemplating what I really wanted to do in the next phase of my life. I knew that I wanted to help Americans move towards ensuring U.S. competitiveness, and given my travel and work around the world, I was aware of two key things:
- Outside of the U.S., people are passionate about the benefits of higher education to move themselves, their families, and their countries forward. Both the people and their governments do everything they can to make college possible.
- Inside the U.S., our high school graduation and college completion scores were declining. Hiring college graduates was a challenge because they wanted significant salaries but weren’t readily equipped to be productive in the workforce. Even the graduates I was hiring, for the companies I was overseeing at that time, proved not to be very effective.