Executive Biography
As CEO and chancellor, Greenstein is transforming Pennsylvania’s $2.3B, 85-,000-student, 10-university system, stabilizing it financially and growing into new student and employer markets. Greenstein brings 30 years' experience of strategic, analytical, and equity-oriented change leadership and a proven track record using innovative education and business models and advanced technology to improve student outcomes, support advances in teaching and research, and increase institutions’ financial resiliency. His massive undertaking in Pennsylvania responds to trends disrupting US higher education generally and is being watched nationally as a harbinger of the industry’s future. It is also showing results. It is stabilizing finances and enrollments, improving student outcomes, and expanding student affordability. These achievements were recognized by an unprecedented 33% increase in State funding accomplished in part while navigating an emergency response to COVID-19.
Previously, Greenstein was tapped by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to lead its higher education work. There he deployed $120M annually in grants, equity, and other investments to develop tools, practices, and public policies that improve outcomes for underserved populations, and are now commonly deployed across the country. He was sourced by Gates from the University of California System where he built one of the world’s largest digital libraries including through private-public partnerships with Google and other companies, advanced innovation in digital publishing, and stabilized the System’s Cadillac-style but financially troubled education abroad and DC and Sacramento internship programs. He also launched UC online –an attempt to serve the 400,000 Californians who were displaced from higher education during the Great Recession.
Greenstein has served on for- and not-for-profit boards overseeing organizations at start-up, turn-around, and launch to scale. He is a dynamic public speaker and recognized thought leader whose strategic advice is regularly sought after. In that role, he has served universities and colleges, federal and state agencies, educational and cultural heritage organizations, as well as companies, and philanthropic and other investors working in and around higher education in the U.S. and Europe. He was also a Senior Advisor to the Boston Consulting Group.
Greenstein holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford. He began his professional career in the United Kingdom initially as an academic historian and later as founding director of two publicly funded internet-based services launched to support art and humanities research at colleges and universities nationally. A biker, hiker, swimmer, voracious reader, and occasional traveler, Greenstein lives in a 1901 row house in downtown Harrisburg Pennsylvania with his partner, Melissa.
