Scott Pulsipher is the President of Western Governors University, the largest online nonprofit university in the United States, serving more than 190,000 concurrently enrolled students across all 50 states. Unlike most university presidents, he did not come up through the academic ranks: he spent over 20 years building technology companies, led teams at Amazon, and grew one startup's revenue eightfold in under two years before joining higher education in 2016.

At WGU he has brought that operating experience to a competency-based, tech-first model built around what he calls student obsession. Under his leadership the university has grown from roughly 65,000 to nearly 200,000 concurrent students and passed half a million degrees awarded, while his team designs an AI-native successor to the model that got them there.