Valuing Talent and Building Wealth

Ecosystem Strategy and the Business of Access

BACE PARTNER FEATURE

When Dr. Tatum D. Thomas, Ph.D., EMBA, arrived at DePaul University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies in 2020, she began listening. What she heard was an institution ready for its next chapter. Through sustained engagement with faculty, staff, students, and community stakeholders, she named that chapter: Learning Reimagined, Work Redefined, and built a plan to get there. That plan was a declaration of what access looks like when strategy meets ambition. She arrived knowing that the students who needed this institution most deserved a leader who would move it forward.

Strategic vision at scale requires ecosystems, and Dr. Thomas builds them. Her cross-institutional alliance portfolio spans enrollment-based partnerships and custom program development across a network of regional, corporate, civic, and international institutions. The Chicagoland Credit for Prior Learning Consortium, co-hosted with City Colleges of Chicago and including College of DuPage, Harper College, and Oakton College, grew participation 135% in a single year under her championship, producing shared assessment protocols that open credential pathways for working adults across the region.

“I believe deeply that identity strengthens the insight that strategy builds from. When you understand how a community defines success, you can build the ecosystems, intellectual frameworks, and actions that deliver on the promise of access.”

— Dr. Tatum D. Thomas, Dean, DePaul University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies

Behind every percentage point is a student who stayed enrolled, a faculty member whose governance voice was heard, a community partner whose workers earned a credential. As dean of a school housing degree, non-degree, and workforce-aligned programs, she directed a five-pillar Learning Reimagined, Work Redefined strategic framework that reversed a 38% credit-hour decline, delivered five consecutive years of budget surplus exceeding targets by margins between 8.4% and 28%, grew total credit hours 31%, and elevated the school's online BBA program to a national U.S. News and World Report Top 10 ranking. Alongside those numbers, Dr. Thomas built the infrastructure that makes transformation durable: a faculty governance agreement she co-authored alongside the tenured faculty body; philanthropic infrastructure that placed 200 students on scholarship and cleared financial holds keeping them enrolled; and executive stewardship of the Labor Education Center, a grant-funded civic institution reaching 19 union partners and 1,834 high school students annually. She activated the institution's structures to produce change. 

When her team identified an opportunity with the University College of the Cayman Islands that aligned with her strategic framework for geographical expansion, she directed institutional resources to advance faculty training in Credit for Prior Learning, extending the reach of competency-based education internationally. The George Washington University LAiSER research partnership advances skills language translation across learner, educator, professional, and employer frameworks. Her corporate and civic partnership portfolio includes the Association for Talent Development (ATD) Chicago, Cook County Public Health, the Chicago Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, Medline, McDonald's Corporation, Northwestern Mutual, and Wintrust Bank, each reflecting her commitment to connecting institutional learning to the economic life and civic infrastructure of the communities she serves. In partnership with BACE, she has been a co-architect of the industry cohort pilot, formally announced at UNCF UNITE and returning this year with a case study, a model that has drawn national interest from other industries seeking to replicate what this collaboration has produced.

The highest-yield opportunities in higher education almost always live at the intersection of community need and institutional ambition. Dr. Thomas has built a framework for finding them. The same instinct that drives her ecosystem strategy drives her academic leadership: she identifies where the highest-yield opportunity lives, commits before consensus arrives, and directs the resources required to deliver results that outlast the moment. That instinct operates on two tracks simultaneously. Ecosystem strategy: reading the landscape, identifying the productive edge, and positioning resources to build alliances and infrastructure that extend far beyond the walls of any single institution. Social intelligence: understanding how communities make choices, what conditions produce bold commitment, and how an empathetic lens transforms strategic vision into shared action that holds. Together these two tracks define how Dr. Thomas leads. When 43.1 million Americans held some college and no credential, she initiated and directed a new Integrated Professional Studies bachelor's degree framework to the faculty curriculum committee for deliberation, grounded in National Student Clearinghouse data and mapped to accreditation requirements. 

When Columbia University committed $100 million to institutional equity, she co-designed the HBCU Fellowship Initiative from inception: infrastructure, advising model, and employer partnerships, welcoming 21 fellows from Morehouse, Howard, Spelman, Hampton, Xavier, and other HBCUs, with applications tripling since. When the Caribbean diasporic experience needed a home in the curriculum, she conceived and championed "Puerto Rico: Expressions of the Leadership-Identity Nexus," an immersive study abroad program moving through San Juan, El Yunque, Ponce, Vieques, and Loíza, engaging students in Caribbean diasporic history, Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous heritage, environmental justice, and community leadership. As a strategic academic leader, every commitment is intentional. She identifies the conditions required for transformation and builds them.

The measure she holds herself to is retention: whether the institution kept its promise to the students who arrived with the most at stake. As a first-generation Caribbean-American and raised Brooklynite who earned her graduate degree within the CUNY system, Dr. Thomas built her career at NYU and Columbia, and completed her Executive MBA at Howard University in 2025, a deliberate, senior-level expression of HBCU commitment. A member of the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at Yale University, she is recognized among an elite network of scholars who exemplify leadership, scholarship, character, service, and advocacy in doctoral education. She presents at the National HBCU Business Deans Roundtable Summit, moderated the "Enriching Institutional Capital through Alliance" panel at the UNCF Institute for Capacity Building in partnership with BACE and JPMorgan Chase, and serves as President-Elect of UPCEA, where she is recognized for "innovating, uplifting nontraditional learners, and leading with vision." The institutions that have shaped her are the institutions she has spent her career serving. Dr. Tatum D. Thomas is the kind of leader the BACE community builds alongside: someone who sees the productive edge, commits to the work, and stays until it compounds into something the field wants to replicate.

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