This fall, Dynamic Campus’s more than 250 employees across the country are celebrating two decades of service as the largest vendor-neutral provider of technology managed services support for higher education institutions in the U.S.

“When [co-founder] Jody [Glubke] and I founded Dynamic Campus in 2002, we were just a handful of people with a background in higher education who believed there was a better way to meet the rapidly evolving IT support needs of colleges and universities,” said Mike Glubke, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO.

“Expectations were rising. Technology was accelerating. Infrastructure was getting more complex. We thought, ‘How could any institution handle that with a static team?’”

At the time, the country was just emerging from the “dot com bust” and the launch of the iPhone was still five years away. However, the population of high school seniors was swelling, spurring a nationwide wave of growth and investment across higher education.

Dynamic Campus grew quickly as forward-thinking leaders of higher education embraced Dynamic Campus’s IT outsourcing model—often referred to as “insourcing”—that augmented existing on-campus IT support teams with a fast-growing roster of higher education IT experts across the country, available any time at a moment’s notice.

With Dynamic Campus, institutions no longer had to go through lengthy recruitment efforts for specialized services like cybersecurity and functional experts in enrollment, financial aid and others; these experienced experts could be on campus one day and gone the next, all for a flat monthly fee.

Institutions were guaranteed to get the exact IT support they needed, exactly when they needed it, at a time when IT investments on campus were growing and changing rapidly. Over the next two decades, Dynamic Campus engaged with more than 300 higher education institutions across the country as the company’s ranks swelled to more than 250 higher education professionals in a wide variety of disciplines and areas of expertise.

“Looking back, the key to our success really comes down to three things,” said Jody Glubke, co-founder and co-CEO. “Our own values align very closely with the values of the smaller, private institutions we’ve been honored to work with. That foundation of trust is what makes us a true partner, not just a vendor.

“Second, it’s our people. They get all the credit. We’ve always been committed to doing whatever it takes to solve the problem at hand. Every member of our team is authorized and empowered to go to any lengths necessary to do what we say we’re going to do, and they never fail to amaze.

“Third, we use technology to solve the institution’s business needs and opportunities. It’s never tech for tech’s sake. We’re trusted partners for the institutions we serve, always asking, ‘How can we leverage IT to unlock the full potential of the institution and prepare it for whatever lies ahead?’”

Despite Dynamic Campus’s growth, it remains fully and privately held, which means there are no outside investors of interests to answer to. It also means the owners of the company are always a call or text away for the leaders of the company’s partner institutions.

“We’re a people business,” Mike Glubke explains. “It’s all we do. We don’t support anyone but higher education institutions. We don’t develop software and we don’t sell software or hardware.

We succeed or fail based on our services and the trust our partners have in us to recommend, deliver, and support the best possible solution for their specific business needs at the best possible price.”

As the company enters its third decade, it’s clear that 20 years of experience helping colleges and universities successfully navigate major disruptions and opportunities like the mobile revolution, remote learning, the Great Recession, and the coronavirus pandemic will count more than ever in the new era of higher education that lies ahead.

“I think the best word to describe how we feel at this moment is grateful,” Jody Glubke added. “We’re grateful to all our Dynamic Campus employees across the country who rise to the challenge and help our partner institutions make the future a reality every single day. We’re also grateful to all the strong, visionary institutional leaders who have believed in us and our abilities over the last 20 years and allowed us to celebrate a milestone we could only have dreamed of in 2002.”

“There’s quite a bit of uncertainty and change in higher education, and that’s going to be the case for the foreseeable future,” Mike Glubke said. “But there’s never been a time in the last 20 years when that wasn’t the case. Leaders today need to be able to remain agile, flexible and make data-driven decisions that help them read, prepare, and react to the evolving landscape. Dynamic Campus is uniquely suited to deliver the technical, functional, and strategic support these leaders need to succeed in this new era of higher education. We’re excited for what the next 20 years will bring.”