What would you build if someone handed you a university with almost no students and told you to start over?
We kick off our EdTech Week 2026 series live from Teachers College's Digital Futures Institute with Dr. Nick Ladany, President of San Francisco Bay University (SFBU). Nick is a first-gen college student and a counseling psychologist by training. He worked his way from professor to dean across Maryland, Temple, Lehigh, Loyola Marymount, Santa Clara, and the University of San Diego, then served as president of Oglethorpe University. In 2023 he arrived at SFBU, a 40-year-old institution with a large unrestricted fund and a mandate to build a university from scratch.
Nick explains what SFBU did with that blank slate. It capped classes at 20, offers full wraparound services including unlimited mental health support, pays faculty top salaries to teach year-round, and trains every faculty member how to teach. It rebuilt general education around industry-validated durable skills: five identities, 15 competencies, and 45 behavioral indicators. Tuition averages about $10,000 a year, the bachelor's degree is 90 credits so students can finish in three years, and the target is an 80% four-year graduation rate. SFBU also has no athletics and no Greek life.
From there, the conversation turns to AI as a co-teacher. Nick introduces Bailey the Bayhawk, SFBU's AI tutor, which is designed to lead students toward productive struggle instead of handing them answers. He also describes the AI faculty avatars at the heart of SFBU's $10,000 AI-enhanced MBA Pro+. In one course, students learn negotiation from an avatar of a real professor, then go head-to-head with an AI boss and get immediate feedback on their skills. That frees human faculty, many of them from industry, to do what they do best: mentor, build community, and coach careers.
Nick doesn't hold back on what's broken in higher ed. He takes on the six-year graduation rate, the SAT, the Carnegie credit hour, athletics spending, faculty senates, and the trustees he says are "in collusion" with a broken financial model. Mike and Nick also dig into SFBU's neighborhood campuses, what community colleges promise and how they fall short, why "college isn't for everyone" can be its own form of exclusion, and how liberal arts thinking is the real disruptive mindset. It's a candid, punk rock look at what higher ed could be.
This is the first of four conversations recorded at EdTech Week 2026. Thanks to StartEd and Alyssa Miller for making it happen.
Guest: Dr. Nick Ladany, President, San Francisco Bay University
Mentioned in this episode: Framing the Teacher Shortage as a Workforce Design Problem with Dr. James Lane
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