David Meek sold the company. The problem kept calling.

David Meek began with a customer who had a complaint. Working in investment advisory services, he visited a higher education institution and asked about its business. A CFO described a gap in the software available for student records and financial management. Meek was already interested in the economics of software: build something once, then sell it repeatedly. Here was a possible answer to the awkward question that follows that attractive proposition. Build what?

Campus Management followed in late 1988. The first product took several years, with a release Meek places around 1991 or 1992. His attention settled on schools serving students who wanted a trade and a route into work. These institutions needed systems that could handle their particular operations and regulatory obligations. The opportunity was tucked inside work that a college had to do every day, whether anyone admired it or not.

The former investment adviser had found a business in the gap between teaching a student and administering an institution. Those activities share a campus, a budget and a great deal of paperwork. They do not always share software that understands both.

The unglamorous business of keeping a college running

A student information system has a modest name for a substantial job. It holds the records and processes that let an institution manage students through their education. A system that sits quietly behind admissions, academic administration and student finance can become central to how a college operates. Nobody puts the database on the graduation invitation. Its work still has to be done before the ceremony.

A 2004 agreement between Campus Management and Bridgepoint Education bears Meek’s signature as president. Its accompanying project estimate lists configuration, data conversion, campus training, cut-over and transition. Read together, those tasks supply a useful portrait of the business he was building. Selling a software license was one step. Moving an institution onto the software involved its records, its routines and its people.

Under Meek, Campus Management expanded beyond its original student system into finance, human resources and fundraising software, serving traditional public and private institutions as well as proprietary colleges. A narrow opening had become a wider administrative business. The company’s reach grew along with the number of jobs its software was expected to perform.

By the account published in a 2019 interview, the business had reached annual revenue above $50 million and served more than 1,000 campuses across North America under his leadership. Revenue and campus count measure different things, but together they explain why Campus Management became the defining chapter of his career. A concern raised by one institution had become a commercial proposition for many.

Meek sold Campus Management in 2008 after roughly twenty years as its founder and chief executive. Leaving a company can be a clean transaction on paper. Leaving the work behind is a separate matter. His subsequent appointments trace a continuing interest in the same institutions and the same difficult relationship between administrative machinery and student progress.

An exit with several entrances

By November 2017, Meek was CEO of Education Technology Associates when he became chairman of Orbund. The agreement gave Education Technology Associates a role marketing and distributing Orbund’s products to the higher education community. Orbund already served more than 250 educational institutions worldwide. Meek was joining an operating business with customers, rather than simply adding an opinion to a boardroom.

“I see in Orbund the same characteristics of desire, passion and focus that we had when I first started Campus Management,” he said. It was a revealing comparison. The attraction he described was the disposition of the team: the appetite to build and the attention to a particular market. He had already experienced where that combination could lead.

“I see in Orbund the same characteristics of desire, passion and focus that we had when I first started Campus Management.”

David Meek · November 2017

In 2019, he was president of Unifyed, working alongside CEO Ranjan Tayal. The company was developing a new student information system and discussing partnerships with SAP and Instructure. Meek’s public emphasis was on enrollment, engagement, affordability and flexibility. The vocabulary of the technology business had moved on. His customer remained recognizably the same.

There were other turns. Through SilverLeaf Systems, he launched ScholarshipMagic for higher education. In May 2021, he joined the board of Tower Education Technologies, whose ambitions included international faculty collaboration and a broader academic experience for students. He welcomed its attempt to reduce costs while improving effectiveness, and its choice to operate as a public benefit corporation.

Those roles took him across software distribution, student engagement, scholarships and collaboration. The connecting thread was the operating life of an educational institution. His career after Campus Management reads less like a departure from a specialty than an extended inspection of its neighboring rooms.

Back to the whiteboard

In 2021, Meek began building Student First. By the time he appeared with colleague Joe Fisher on a podcast recorded at the 2024 Career Education Convention in Indianapolis, his original company had become a competitor. There is a certain occupational hazard in founding a business that lasts: eventually, you may have to sell against it.

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His explanation for returning centered on smaller and midsize institutions. He saw colleges paying for older systems while larger projects attracted attention elsewhere. He gathered experienced colleagues to build a fresh platform, and described the starting point as a whiteboard. Fisher, the company’s vice president of solutions at the time, was among the people he recruited.

Meek also wanted implementation to fit into a more reasonable portion of a working life. His stated vision was to deliver within twelve months, partly to reduce cost and partly because college staff still had their regular jobs to do. That second consideration gives the ambition its human scale. A migration project lands on desks that are already occupied.

Fisher’s own explanation of joining adds another perspective. He had spent much of his consulting career visiting smaller colleges and universities. Meek’s mission appealed to him because it addressed institutions he knew. He also valued the chance to develop software without carrying a long history of older technology. Experience supplied the familiarity; starting afresh supplied room to act on it.

Student First now describes its founder’s goal as giving institutions access to a modern student information system suited to the way they operate. Its leadership includes Viki Hucke-McCright, whose career included Campus Management and Anthology, and Garland Hall, with executive experience at Ellucian and Frontline Education. Meek has returned with colleagues who know the market from several sides.

The next connection is financial

On May 4, 2026, Blackbaud announced a strategic investment in Student First. The proposed connection joins Student First’s student information platform to Blackbaud’s financial management, fundraising, award management and payments products. The practical ambition is to connect student activity with the financial systems that help sustain an institution.

A college’s enrollment records and its general ledger tell related stories. So do scholarship awards, tuition payments and fundraising. When those accounts sit apart, the institution must do the work of bringing them together. The partnership is intended to make that connection part of the operating model. Its significance for Meek is concrete: the business he now leads is linking its central student system to another company’s financial and advancement tools.

Blackbaud’s Mark Davis described the aim as connecting the financial side of an institution to the student information side. Meek framed the relationship as an extension of Student First’s platform. The announcement set out planned benefits for joint customers, including a more connected experience for students. It was a statement of direction for the partnership, with the delivery work still part of the story.

On July 27, Blackbaud announced an expanded innovation partnership. The collaboration would run through product, sales and marketing, with the companies working toward a connected campus model. It would also focus on practical uses of AI to reduce manual work and help staff use information. For a founder who has spent decades in administrative software, the test is familiar: how does the technology help someone carry out the day’s work?

Still writing about the work

In September 2026, Meek contributed an essay to Career Education Review’s centennial issue. He argued that the opening of Workforce Pell to shorter workforce programs brought operational demands alongside opportunity. His attention went to data quality, adaptability and systems capable of tracking outcomes. The article returned to career education, the territory that had helped shape Campus Management’s early market.

He approached the subject through the responsibilities institutions would have to carry: recording completion and placement, managing different program schedules, and producing dependable information. The argument was consistent with his commercial career, but it also showed where his attention goes when he writes. A policy change becomes a question about whether a school can administer the promise it makes.

That is a useful way to understand Meek’s persistence. His companies have changed, his roles have included founder, executive and chairman, and the underlying technology has developed enormously. The institutional problem keeps presenting itself in new forms. A college still needs its records, its finances and its everyday work to support what happens to students.

The story began when he asked a CFO how things worked and heard what was missing. Nearly four decades later, he is again building software around that question. The graduation invitation may never mention the system. Meek has made a career of attending to the work behind it.