HINESVILLE, Ga. () — Southeast Georgia continues to grow, and Georgia Southern University (GSU) is no different.

University President Kyle Marrero spoke to the Hinesville Rotary Club Tuesday at the school’s Liberty Campus about growth resulting from and affecting the university.

“We’re so fortunate to live in a region in southeast Georgia that we are the geographic epicenter with campuses in Statesboro, Savannah and Hinesville,” Marrero said. “For us, it’s an incredible opportunity…not only for us to recruit new students and to be partners in this growth but to help solve the problems, the issues around that with our public impact research agenda, so on both sides of it, it’s our greatest opportunity and then also our greatest challenge.”

Marrero highlighted multiple records that were broken by the institution in the last year. The list included enrollment, scholarship funding and fundraising.

He added that the university is designing curriculum to meet the needs of the growing region by preparing its students to be ideal candidates for businesses coming to the area.

One way the university is doing this is by making sure all classes lead to lifelong lessons, according to Marrero.

“People have been acting pretty badly for the last couple thousand years around the world,” Marrero said. “You want to look at all of history and you start to understand human behavior and if you can apply that thing to your job as a nurse or your job as a as a cybersecurity technician or I.T. specialist or an engineer, and understand when you’re working in teams…you start to reflect on what you learn and how you can actually articulate that into your own performance…then suddenly your education has more meaning than just the forces required to graduate.”

The university itself is growing as earlier this year, GSU announced it will consolidate with East Georgia State College. The full consolidation is expected to be finalized in January and GSU to have full ownership by the fall 2026 semester.