Quinn Koller

Director of Academic Strategy, Utah Valley University.
Principal, QR Strategic Foresight.
Strategic advisor to university presidents, provosts, and governing boards.

Quinn Koller has spent more than three decades working at the intersection of higher education, strategic foresight, and institutional design, across roles spanning five continents and sectors including federal intelligence, international regulatory affairs, corporate development, academic leadership, and executive advisory work.

The through line across those roles is a single discipline: helping organizations make better decisions under conditions they didn't fully anticipate. In higher education, that discipline is in high demand and short supply.

Current work:

At Utah Valley University, Quinn serves as Director of Academic Strategy, leading institution-level work across program analytics, enrollment forecasting, contribution-margin modeling, capacity optimization, and AI-assisted academic planning. A recent portfolio analysis identified $8.5 million in strategic reinvestment opportunities across UVU's academic programs, with findings presented directly to Academic Affairs leadership.

Previously, as Director of Institutional Effectiveness, Accreditation, and Academic Assessment, Quinn directed NWCCU accreditation processes, designed assessment and program-review frameworks, and partnered with deans on demand and margin data to guide new-program proposals and teach-out decisions. He has served as an NWCCU Institutional Peer Reviewer since 2024, and holds NWCCU Mission Fulfillment Fellow and Data Equity Fellow designations.

At QR Strategic Foresight, Quinn advises higher education and public-sector leaders on strategic foresight, academic portfolio decisions, AI adoption frameworks, and value-creation learning. Executive workshops, feasibility studies, and contribution-margin models are the primary advisory outputs. The practice is the setting where the ideas in this newsletter get stress-tested before they appear in writing.

What Quinn has built:

Program development at UVU includes a B.S. in Strategic Foresight in Business, Applied AI programs in the College of Engineering and Technology, and a Sports Management Minor and Certificate that has maintained consistent enrollment of 30 or more students per semester without any marketing investment. The Business Analysis B.S. grew from 800 to 1,200 majors following a foresight-informed curriculum redesign.

Nine courses developed and taught, spanning sport management, business security and resilience, futures and strategic foresight, generative AI and strategic innovation, AI workflow automation, and advanced research methods in strategic foresight.

AI-embedded course projects reached more than 120 students, integrating prompt engineering, ethics, and applied analytics. AI literacy programs are in active development for faculty and staff within the Woodbury School of Business.

Recognized work:

Quinn has presented at AASCU Annual Conferences for Presidents and Provosts, NWCCU Annual Meetings, the ACE Annual Meeting, and AAC&U, on topics including AI assessment redesign, data-informed academic resilience, integrated program management, and instructional economics. He has presented alongside institution presidents, accreditation bodies, and national higher education policy organizations.

Publications include a prepublication framework paper on value-creation learning in the age of AI, a forthcoming higher education leadership playbook for 2035, and international boundary reports produced during a five-year posting at the U.S. Department of State.

He led UVU's Men's Rugby program to the 2015 D1AA Varsity Cup National Championship, served nine years as Treasurer of the Rocky Mountain Association for Institutional Research, and has been recognized as Most Valuable Professor by UVU Athletics.

Earlier career:

Before entering higher education administration, Quinn served as a Geographic Attaché at the U.S. Department of State, chaired the Intelligence Community Geospatial Data Users Committee, and managed interagency information-exchange programs in Europe and Africa. He built a federal contracting business line to $3 million within two years at Library Associates Companies, managing large-scale outsourcing contracts for the Library of Congress, Department of Justice, and Smithsonian. At Laureate Education, he coordinated international accreditation and compliance activities across more than 20 institutions, liaising with the State Department and foreign ministries of education.

That cross-sector background is not incidental to the advisory work. Institutions that have only ever been advised by people who have only ever worked in institutions tend to get advice that reflects that limitation.

Credentials:

M.S., College Leadership and Administration, Purdue Global University.
B.S., Liberal Studies and Geography, Excelsior University.
IBM GenAI Engineering Certificate.
Google Data Analytics Certificate.
Johns Hopkins University, Data Science Certificate.
Registered Product Owner, Scrum Inc.
CITI Program certified for research with human subjects.
Reading fluency in Afrikaans, Dutch, French, and German.

Uncharted Institutions (H2):

Uncharted Institutions is a weekly strategic brief for senior leaders in higher education, published every Friday. It applies the same analytical discipline as the advisory and institutional work to the signals, decisions, and frameworks that matter most for university presidents, provosts, CFOs, and trustees.

It is free.

[Subscribe to Uncharted Institutions →]

Connect:

LinkedIn: [linkedin.com/in/quinnkoller]

Advisory and speaking inquiries: [email or contact form]