A Different Kind of Campus

Jim Blasingame Interviews Paul Quintal of Trump University

Who created Trump University? What's the philosophy behind it? Paul Quintal, Trump University's Vice President, answers those questions, and more, in this recent radio interview with Jim Blasingame on Small Business Advocate Radio.

Jim Blasingame: What exactly is Trump University?

Paul Quintal: Trump University is a lifelong learning company that focuses on business and personal development. We offer quality learning experiences on topics that are of interest to entrepreneurs, real estate investors and business owners. We are an international university. It might interest you to know that nearly 35 percent of our students come from outside the United States.

JB: How did Trump University get started?

PQ: Donald Trump personally founded the organization. His philosophy shaped Trump University from day one. He believes deeply in experiential learning - "learning

JB: So you are talking about electronic learning, or e-learning?

PQ: Yes, but that is not the whole story. I don't know what your education was like. But when I was in school, and later on in college and business school, I usually sat in lecture halls while "talking head" professors droned on and on. Within 10 minutes, my eyes would glaze over and I would not get anything out of it.

Mr. Trump believes that people learn by doing things, not by memorizing information. You will see his philosophy at work in all our courses. We use simulation tools. We provide workbooks and assignments, but they are exciting, engaging and frictionless because people are tackling assignments that they can apply immediately to achieve their goals. You will find this philosophy at work in our high-end courses with instructors, phone-in-sessions, coursework and other interactive features. But you will also find it in our most basic self-instructional audio courses.

So to summarize, we have Mr. Trump at the top, overseeing our organization. He keeps us on track with his philosophy of experiential learning and he also keeps us focused on the topics that he feels are of utmost importance: wealth creation, real estate investing and business ownership, for example.

JB: How are you building your faculty?

PQ: Our faculty consists of professors and subject matter experts from some of the most prestigious institutions in the United States, as well as real-life experts inbusiness disciplines. For example, we have Dr. Gary Eldred at the head of our real estate faculty.He has written 22 books and taught at Stanford, the University of Virginia and other prestigious schools. Dr. Donald Sexton, who is a professor at Columbia University, directs our marketing studies. He is a top marketing consultant too.

And then we have specialist instructors who teach the kind of real-world knowledge that they have acquired on the front lines of business - people like Richard Parker, who is well educated to be sure, but who teaches a course on how to buy a business, because that is what he bas been doing all of his life.

JB: Do your faculty members understand that they are teaching students who already have a lot of real-world experience?

PQ: Absolutely. Our faculty members know they can bypass a lot of the preliminary information and go right to the nuts-and-bolts knowledge that professionals need.

We have an advantage because we are not just a college, but a business too. We survey our students on a regular basis to understand their needs so that we can give them the real-world skills that teach success. We can deliver the courses that they want very quickly, without all the red tape that would tie up a traditional university. Perhaps this is why only 16 months after we opened our virtual doors, well over 300,000 people had signed up to take our courses and receive communications from us.

JB: Do you think that Trump University will ever offer degrees?

PQ: It is something we are thinking about very seriously. But right now, there is an immediate need for real-world information that we need to address.

JB: What about the cost of your courses?

PQ: Compared to the cost of a traditional university education, we are very cost-effective. On the top end, we offer six-month, certificate-granting courses that cost about $2,400. But you can also get a self-instructional course for about $40. One of the mostpopular is a course presented by Mr. Trump himself, called How to Build a Fortune. It costs only $39.95. We have sold thousands and thousands of those courses. When you offer the insights of a business giant like Donald Trump for a price that attractive, people are interested.

JB: And what is the big secret, in that course, that Mr. Trump has to teach?

PQ: Tenacity. The art of thinking big, of never giving up. People know that Mr. Trump is extremely successful, but in reality his greatest trait is perseverance. He has had challenges along the way, and he is a big enough person to talk about them openly so that the rest of us can learn.

Paul Quintal is Vice President of Trump University. Jim Blasingame is president of The Small Business Advocate.To explore The Small Business Advocate's archive of radio interviews like this one, click here.

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