From Blockbuster Weekends to Record Retention

How Campus Director James Grover Helps Students Pursue Their Brightest Future from a Place of Calm

“Totally random” is how James Grover, Campus Director at IntelliTec College in Albuquerque, describes his path to working in education. It was 2007 and Grover oversaw a chain of movie theatres on the East Coast when he received a call from a recruiter on behalf of a career school.

“I was going to be a high school English teacher, and then the movie theater thing came along and I just stuck with that” says Grover. “I was like, I guess I'm not meant to be an educator. I'm not meant to be in that field.” But this recruiter was persistent. Grover met with the team at that East Coast school for what would become, to date, a nearly two-decade career in education.

Grover gets reflective about what drew him to that initial Campus Director position:

“The fact that I had an opportunity not just to help people mold or change their lives, but an opportunity to help people kind of figure out, you know, the path they want to take. Not just the education that they needed to help fill in some of the blanks in their lives, but just the path they wanted to take to get to that point, to better their lives.”

Grover has held many roles at various schools since that fateful first school interview, including Director of Admissions, Regional Director, Regional Director of Admissions, Regional Vice President, Vice President of Operations and Chief Operating Officer, but says he likes the role of Campus Director best of all for the one-on-one support he’s able to offer to staff and students.

“My favorite role is Campus Director because you get to have a lasting impact and you're really the boots on the ground there that helps on a day-to-day basis. I love the other positions. They're great, but there's just more tangible, visible results sitting here at the school than there is traveling around.”

When asked about the path that led him to his career in education, Grover notes the parallel between the role of that recruiter years ago, who saw something in him that he hadn’t realized about himself, and what he’s able to do now for staff and students at IntelliTec.

“ That taught me to pay it forward, right? You think, it’s this tiny little thing that was an email back in August of 2007, just ‘Hey. We think you'd be great for this position.’ I initially laughed like I'm sure half of our prospective students do. Oh, we think you'd be great in the automotive industry or as a computer science technologist. You think about these small little things that can really change the course of somebody's life for the better.”

It was a big leap for Grover to leave the movie theatre industry he had known and loved since middle school. He ultimately made the leap and was immediately met with a significant challenge. Almost as soon as he entered his new position, he found out that if performance outcomes at the school he was hired at did not improve, the school was set to be closed within six months. Not one to back away from a challenge, Grover set to work in this new field with what would become his signature “students first” approach. He instituted a policy of accountability. His team was dedicated to making sure students had not only what was promised to them in their enrollment agreements but also the resources and support they needed to succeed. His approach had an immediate impact. This school, that prior to Grover’s arrival, had averaged 13-20 dropped enrollments per month, had zero dropouts in his first six months there.

Grover has this to share on helping students to overcome obstacles:

“ If you can just take the tiny little nuggets one piece at a time, it's not that daunting. But when you sit back and look at stuff like that and say, ‘oh geez, how am I going to overcome this huge obstacle of losing transportation or housing?’ It's a big thing in the moment. It is huge, but it is one small blip in your path to success if you really take a step back, and that's what we're here for: to help people take a step back. To be a voice of reason or to just be an ear, for somebody to kind of bend so they can express their concerns and express the things that they feel like are hindering their success in life, and then helping them overcome that so they can take that next step.”

Grover says his role as Campus Director at IntelliTec goes beyond a job. He considers it a great privilege to help others, in particular to make sure students have the tools and support they need to be successful in school and in their lives. He also shares his appreciation for the team at IntelliTec and the way they stay focused on the needs of students.

“ Here at IntelliTec, we honestly really stand behind what we say we're going to do. We make sure that we deliver on our promises. Sometimes we actually take a step back so that we can be better informed to deliver on those promises. So it's not just the parroting things or saying things so that people will just be quiet and go away. It's like. No, really James, what do you need to be successful over there?

Here, we're about making sure that you leave in a better spot than you came. That's plain and simple, day in and day out, and making sure that we have the resources to be successful so that that's possible.”

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While a couple of decades ago the idea of working in education may have come as a surprise to Grover, his eventual move to Albuquerque was strategic. He shares that he asked a friend who had lived in Albuquerque about the area and had an idea in the back of his mind that if an opportunity popped up there, he would seek it out, saying “I want to check out the Land of Enchantment and see what it’s all about.”

“Albuquerque to me is a hidden gem.”