Story by Liz Miller
Visuals by Ella Manthey
It’s not common for a university chancellor to display student artwork from a preschooler in their office – probably because most universities don’t offer early childcare education.
But Southern Illinois University Edwardsville is no ordinary school, and its leader, Dr. James T. Minor, is no ordinary chancellor.
“I often say SIUE is one of the few places you could go from preschool to PhD, which is pretty remarkable for an institution of higher learning to have touchpoints with demographics across the educational pipeline,” Minor says.
Based in Edwardsville, Illinois, SIUE runs multiple federally funded Head Start programs as well as educational programming for elementary and middle school students. The university also runs SIUE East St. Louis Charter High School, where, for the past four years, the valedictorian and other young scholars have continued on to college there.
“What we’re saying to them is that if you stay on this path, we’re here waiting for you when it’s time for you to make a decision about college,” Minor says. “I don’t underestimate the power of early exposure and that early experience with the university. And listen, I would love for every single one of them to enroll here. But if that doesn’t happen, I’m OK, so long as they find the right place.”
Investing in students, their families, and the Metro East community sits at the heart of Minor’s work. He takes pride in watching students grow, whether it’s a toddler named Zion, who drew the portrait of Minor that’s now framed in his office, or by developing relationships with college freshmen that continue long after graduation.
And it’s making a measurable impact.
SIUE is now the leading provider of bachelor’s degrees in the St. Louis region, and the No. 1 producer of Bachelor of Science in Nursing degrees. This past spring, SIUE surpassed 150,000 degrees awarded during commencement ceremonies, a historic milestone for the university. From spring 2025 to spring 2026, under Minor’s leadership, SIUE saw a 6.5% increase in enrollment growth, even in an ever-changing higher education landscape. And a staggering 60% of SIUE graduates live and work within a 50-mile radius of campus.
The university also bolsters the region with a staggering $514 million annual economic impact, strengthening workforce development, community partnerships, innovation initiatives, affordable access to higher education, and academic collaboration. Minor believes that SIUE is building a strong talent pipeline that will help the St. Louis region succeed in both legacy and emerging industries.
“Economic growth of this region depends on having talented, educated citizens who are committed to this region,” Minor says. “And I struggle to find a university in this region that’s more consequential to accomplishing that goal.”
Expanding Education
Minor’s focus on making education accessible to all is rooted in his own journey. Born and raised in Detroit, his path to college didn’t come into clear focus until a teacher asked him about his plans after graduation — and he shrugged his shoulders.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t have ambition or I wasn’t interested, I just didn’t have the technical information about how to transition from high school to college,” Minor says. “His name was Mr. Cecil Forbes. He called me into his office, and he began to talk to me about a plan to get from high school to college. Mr. Cecil Forbes happened to be an alumnus of Jackson State University, which is where I ended up as an undergraduate — sight unseen, by the way.”
Minor excelled at Jackson State, earning a spot on the dean’s list, and found his calling while working on a large data set project in the sociology department. The project evaluated life satisfaction using data from people across the U.S., and Minor identified that the single most important variable was one’s level of education.
“The higher you went up on the education scale, all of these other outcomes you tended to have greater satisfaction with,” Minor says. “You saw this significant improvement for individuals who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree. They tended to live longer. They had health insurance. They owned homes. They were more optimistic about life. The list went on. And I thought, ‘aha.’”
When Minor looked at the population of people who had achieved that level of educational attainment, however, he saw grave disparities by income, race, and gender.
“And somehow I get the idea that if we could just get a greater number of people a college degree, they too would be able to enjoy it. Now, this is a very naive version of this correlation, but that was the moment that I became an educator. I really had a firm commitment to do everything that I could to help people go as far as they wanted to in terms of educational attainment.”
After graduating from Jackson State University with a bachelor’s in sociology, Minor earned a master’s in sociology from the University of Nebraska before completing a doctorate in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining SIUE in 2022, he served as assistant vice chancellor and senior strategist in the Office of the Chancellor at California State University and was previously the deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education.
“For the majority of my career — different titles, different platforms, different organizations — I think all of the work has been focused on how do we get a greater number and percentage of American citizens a college degree.”
A few years ago, working toward that goal, SIUE made a commitment to low-income families earning below $64,000 annually that tuition and fees would be fully covered for students accepted into the university from those households. Minor notes that many institutions offer a similar commitment, yet after listening to feedback from families and students whose households fell above that threshold, they made a unique change.
“What we realized is that there were a lot of families above that threshold who still couldn’t afford college,” Minor says. “And so we went back and raised the threshold to $113,575. So if you’re an Illinois resident coming from a household below that threshold, tuition and fees are covered. Then we got calls from high school counselors in St. Louis, who said, ‘SIUE is a lot closer than Columbia, or a lot closer than S&T, and we would really love for our students to be able to take advantage of that.’ So we established what is now referred to as SIUE GO, which stands for Gateway Opportunity.”
Today, SIUE GO offers to help close the gap for tuition and fees for qualifying Missouri students who reside in Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, St. Charles, St. Louis, St. Louis City, and Warren counties.
“We were super proud to extend that opportunity for individuals in St. Louis and Missouri,” Minor says. “Part of our message is we want them to see this as a viable option for them. It will support the economic growth of the City of St. Louis. And I suspect that it will support the social and civic growth of the City of St. Louis.”
Building a Better Tomorrow
Roughly 45 days after becoming chancellor of SIUE, Minor faced one of the hardest challenges in his career so far: an $18 million structural budget deficit.
“It was concerning because the things that were driving the structural deficit were still in place,” Minor recalls. “The risk was that it could grow from 18 million to 22 million to 26 million and so on, unless you had pretty immediate action. And it was not on my list of things to do walking through the door. I want to be very clear about that — I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do first, second, and third, and that wasn’t on the list. And so I had to set many of those things aside to make sure that the institution was on very sound financial ground in order to pursue some of the strategic objectives we had outlined for the university.”
Minor is proud that under his leadership, the university was able to close the deficit without borrowing from its reserves or cutting any core programming. He is also proud that SIUE is leading in programs and degrees in emerging industries as well as those experiencing workforce shortages, including nursing and accounting.
He has worked hard over the years to forge partnerships with the business community in the St. Louis region, too, to help create internship and career connections for students and local employers.
“I’ve been very clear with our business community about this over the last couple of years, about the kind of investment we should expect from the business community in terms of producing the next generation of graduates that they will welcome into their businesses,” Minor says. “That has been a fairly new message for the St. Louis community, but I think it’s the right disposition for us, and I think we have the data to back up this claim of how important this institution is to the workforce in St. Louis.”
In particular, the university has built national-caliber research strengths in two areas where the St. Louis region has a strategic advantage and where industry demand is growing: geospatial technology and biomanufacturing and biotechnology.
Founded in 1995, SIUE’s GeoMARC, an applied geospatial research center, has completed more than 160 projects since inception for government agencies, including the Department of Defense, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, as well as Fortune 500 companies and community partners.
And through SIUE’s National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center, which has been operating on campus for more than two decades, the university has contributed to commercializing more than 80 products, helped create more than 5,000 jobs, and generated more than $5.6 billion in annual revenue.
“I said to a group of alumni a week or two ago — we were talking about the evolution of our academic programs to ensure that they remain relevant and that they map onto workforce needs — and I said, ‘Listen, the majority of people in this room, when you went to college, cybersecurity was not a major. None of us in college knew what geospatial technology was or meant. These are all things that have emerged over the last two decades. And the question is, what’s the appropriate evolution of academic programs to meet industry needs and societal needs for today?’ So I’m very proud that our programs have been really good at making incremental adjustments over the last decade to make sure that graduates who are leaving those programs are prepared to go to work right away.”
Continuing to build on that foundation, SIUE recently celebrated the opening of its new 176,000-square-foot state-of-the-art Health Sciences Complex, which now houses the university’s School of Nursing and Pharmacy. Minor says he’s in conversation with leaders at regional health-care systems to better understand the challenges they face and how students can be best prepared for the health-care jobs of tomorrow.
“We know that in the state of Missouri, in the state of Illinois, even in the nation, there is a critical shortage of nurses,” Minor says. “And SIUE today is making an outsized contribution as the number one producer of nurses in this region; we have been for a long time. We’re very proud of that. And this past fall nursing was among the top majors that students were selecting. So I expect that we’re going to grow in the productivity of new nurses ready to move into health care systems.”
Minor mentions how artificial intelligence is already reshaping health care, and emphasizes that SIUE is sometimes making curriculum adjustments in real time to meet those changing needs. “But it’s also the question of what it means to be a modern nurse,” he adds. “How good are you at communicating with family members? How comfortable are you in different settings on different medical units?”
To that end, the new Health Sciences Complex features spaces that are intended to replicate a real hospital environment, including a mock surgical unit.
“We want students to feel like when they arrive at the workplace that they’ve seen it and had a lot of practice doing it,” Minor says. “The question today is if we’re going to continue to produce the requisite number of health care professionals needed, what’s the appropriate partnership with health care partners who are going to be on the receiving end of much needed nurses? And that is a question that we’re exploring with a number of health care partners in the region.”
Leaving a Legacy
There may be no better window into Minor’s work at SIUE than walking around with him on the university’s verdant campus. Even in summer, when the majority of college students are on break, the stream of students and staff who enthusiastically approach him is near constant.
The university hosts and partners to host summer youth programs for a range of ages, and it would seem, even if improbable, that Minor knows each student’s name. He chats with one student who spent last summer as a participant in one such program only to now be a leader in that same program, remarking on how proud he is of his growth. He chats with another, checking in to see if she’s still on track with her major or if her plans have changed. The students greet him with admiration yet also the kind of ease you might associate with a peer — a delicate balance to strike, especially with young people, yet one that feels entirely natural.
Walking around the quad, Minor points to recent campus life improvements, including new hammocks tethered to mature trees and clusters of bright red Adirondack chairs that encourage students to gather in community. When he spots a piece of litter on the pavement, he picks it up and tosses it in a nearby trashcan without missing a beat. It’s a small action, but one that provides insight into how students can both revere and befriend him: He is an inspiring leader with a strong vision, but also an approachable educator deeply invested in making SIUE a welcoming place for everyone.
Under his leadership, SIUE might not be an ordinary school with an ordinary chancellor, and perhaps that’s by design.
“Maybe the root word for university is universe. It’s all things,” Minor says. “And unlike industry, where you build this, the university has a chemistry department, a School of Dental Medicine, a national corn-to-ethanol research center, GeoMARC, a School of Engineering. The list goes on and on. In addition, there are more than 2,500 people who work here, more than 13,000 students roughly. An athletics operation, food service operations, students sleeping on campus. A dynamic range of administrative issues. And any given day can be filled with challenges. So it is easy to lose sight of some of the bigger objectives, and to have a real sense of whether or not you’re making progress on those key objectives.”
“But then there’s one other important milestone in the course of any academic year, which is commencement — the personification of the goal, the personification of the mission of the institution, where you have young people who made a bold decision to pursue a college degree here at SIUE. And you see them four, maybe five, years later, crossing the stage in celebration that they have earned a college degree that sets them up to live their dreams. And that is powerful. And we have a very strong sense that those students are prepared to succeed.”
