Jay Heiler is Chief Executive Officer and founding Chairman of Great Hearts Academies, the leading provider of classical liberal arts education in the United States.  Great Hearts, a non-profit charter school organization, started in 2002 with 130 students in a leased church building and is now a rapidly growing, $240 million entity, educating more than 30,000 students in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana to the highest standards.

Jay is a past member and Chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents, the governing body for Northern Arizona University, Arizona State University, and the University of Arizona, serving from 2012 to 2020. He has previously served as assistant attorney general in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, and as Chief of Staff to Governor Fife Symington, where he advanced a number of public policies in varied fields that are still serving Arizonans decades later. Since leaving public service and subsequently co-founding Great Hearts, he has worked as both a consultant and legal counsel to numerous companies, industries, and chief executives in Arizona and beyond. From 2018 to 2020 he was a member of Beus, Gilbert, McGroder, a leading Arizona law firm in commercial litigation and land use. He is former assistant editor of the editorial pages of The Richmond Times-Dispatch, Virginia’s newspaper of record; editor-in-chief of the State Press, ASU’s campus daily; and in 2013 he was named Arizona’s Innovative Leader of the Year by the state’s Chamber of Commerce. Heiler is a graduate of both the ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunications, where he was named a Pulliam Scholar. He is a member of the bars of both Arizona and Virginia.  He grew up on a farm in rural Ohio and went away to Tempe, Arizona for college in 1978, where he resided for eight years in a 12-feet-wide trailer home.