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University of Phoenix — Making a Difference Today

A Clash of Cultures in Academe
by Brian Mueller, President, Apollo Group

The article in the New York Times by Sam Dillon has exposed a clash of cultures between traditional academia and newer, market-oriented colleges and universities.

The education crisis

America’s economic power depends upon our educated workforce and by all counts, we’re failing. Forrester Research has predicted that about 3.3 million U.S. service jobs will move to foreign countries by 2015, yet we continue to leave behind masses of potential students who either can’t afford college or can’t find a seat in one. It may come as a surprise that your own alma mater is not what the majority of college students may want or need today and for the next decade. Those bucolic, sentimental, ivy-covered campuses may even be obsolete with their heavy investment in physical facilities, semesters based on a bygone agrarian system, and class schedules that appear to honor the more pressing needs of the faculty than the flexibility required by students.

Today the majority of students are cobbling together their education in fits and starts, commuting to colleges part-time while working full-time. Many are single parents and first-generation college students, and frequently they must engage in remedial coursework in order to overcome an incomplete or insufficient educational past. These are the students who overwhelmingly need flexible learning options such as online classes, alternative schedules, financial assistance and access to intensive support services to provide a coherent path to their degree. These are the students that most of the traditional higher education community has left behind.

New market-oriented colleges do the nation’s work

Market-oriented colleges like University of Phoenix are an essential part of the solution. The land-grant colleges originally intended to provide broad access to education cannot do it alone. In their quest for prestige, many of them have raised both tuition and admission standards beyond the reach of most students. Community colleges are filled to capacity, graduating fewer than 25% and struggling to learn how to serve this growing population.

In this environment, the rise of private for-profit colleges and universities should be no surprise. These institutions provide educational access to a broad spectrum of students, and they push the envelope on important innovations in flexibility and quality because they are fundamentally organized to confront market forces. Taxpayer dollars are not available to these colleges to fund their growth or services. Rather, public dollars come in the form of loans and grants, which go directly to students to fund their education. As employers, market-oriented colleges pay into the tax system and provide local employment opportunities. It’s a perfect example of America’s free enterprise system, whereby demand for a service fuels the growth of innovation and supply. Not just any service – but one that our nation desperately needs.

Quality and Regulation

Traditions die hard, despite the dismal realities confronting our public education system. Regulation and popular sentiment favor the status quo. It’s nice to believe that non-profit organizations have a higher moral purpose, but despite the extreme rhetoric about regulatory mishaps in for-profit education, there is no evidence that the accredited for-profits are any more or less compliant in regulatory matters than their non-profit peers. Indeed, if oversight is a comfort, the private, for-profit higher education sector is certainly the most examined and therefore most transparent in all of American higher education; accountable to local, state, federal and accreditation boards in addition to the Securities and Exchange Commission. They also must provide evidence of outputs or educational quality by maintaining comprehensive learning assessment systems, available to their regulatory overseers.

Education in the 21st Century

However, as with all innovation, skeptics abound to feed the culture clash between the old and the new. Those invested in the status quo objected when land grant colleges were introduced and also when community colleges came on the scene, railing against their supposed lack of quality, For-profit colleges are the latest target. We know that students will choose to earn their education both online and on campus, probably at multiple institutions, and from the colleges that can provide the most support and flexibility. There is no turning back – this is what education looks like in the 21st century.

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