Going Big in Higher Education: Josh Hall on Innovation, Opportunity, and Helping Students Find Their Way

What if some of the biggest opportunities for young people are the ones they’ve never been exposed to?

Dr. Josh Hall, dean of the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University, has built his career around asking questions like that. From studying the institutions that drive economic prosperity to rethinking how a business school serves its students and its state, Hall has become an innovative leader in higher education.

From a C- to a Career in Economics

Hall didn’t always plan to become an economist. He originally imagined becoming a high school teacher and hockey coach. In college, he struggled with his first economics course and earned a C-minus.

Then he took a macroeconomics course taught by Richard Vedder.

Vedder’s teaching changed Hall’s trajectory. More importantly, the mentorship Hall received showed him what a professor could do when he took the time to know a student personally. That lesson has stayed with Hall throughout his career.

Building Opportunities in West Virginia

At WVU, Hall has focused on creating opportunities that connect students with the real world.

The university’s students work on actual state audits, analyze data for businesses, and tackle client projects involving artificial intelligence and data analytics. Hall believes experiential education can help students discover talents and careers they may never have considered.

As he puts it, if a smart student in West Virginia is traditionally told to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, there are countless other fields they may never even encounter, from supply chain to professional sales to fundraising.

The job of higher education, he argues, is to expose students to those possibilities and give them opportunities to discover where they can contribute.

A Bigger Vision for West Virginia

That philosophy also drives Hall’s work with the Kendrick Center for Ethical Economics.

The center’s vision extends beyond the university. It seeks to expose high school students across West Virginia to economics, develop future leaders through an undergraduate program in business ethics and prosperity, and create incentives for talented graduates to remain in the state.

Hall’s goal is ambitious: help change the long-term trajectory of a state where too many educated young people leave in search of opportunity.

Experiment, Learn, and Keep Going

Hall is also candid about the mistakes that come with trying new things. One experiment involving a transfer-pricing system became a billing nightmare, teaching him that sometimes a simpler institutional solution is better.

That willingness to experiment is central to his leadership philosophy. Start small, test an idea, learn what works, and build from there.

For Hall, going big in higher education means creating institutions that provide real value to students while giving them the experiences, mentors, and opportunities they need to discover what they can do.

And perhaps his biggest lesson is one that applies far beyond higher education: sometimes helping someone go big begins with simply showing them a possibility they never knew existed.