Q&A with head of U. of Phoenix
The University of Phoenix is usually portrayed as the devil by most traditional higher education providers, but the new president seems like a pretty normal guy. With 300,000 and 250,000 graduates, Phoenix is largest accredited private university in the country.
I was surprised at how inexpensive the typical undergraduate degree was; I would have guessed that it was more in line with Syracuse–also a private, accredited university–with tuition and fees of $29,965 annually.
‘Students come to us at different parts in their career, plus our tuition varies by geographical region. But if you’re looking for a homogenized number, probably between $30,000 and $40,000.
With graduation rates of around 60%, Phoenix compares with many large open-enrollment state universities. Students leave for the reasons we would expect:
Pepicello: The two largest reasons they give us are, No. 1, financial and No. 2, life gets in the way. For adult students, obviously that makes sense.
Pepicello is quite candid about why the Unviversity of Phoenix was founded.
The mission of, say, Harvard is to serve a certain sector of the population and their mission is not to grow. And that’s true of higher education in general. The reason the University of Phoenix exists at all is that is that all of those various (universities) and their missions did not provide access to a large number of students who are capable and wanted access to higher education. And that’s our mission.
In general, I’m not a big believer in the “education should be more like business” mythology; in fact, I think that’s the worst thing institutions could be doing. However, I do think that those of us in traditional professional schools should pay attention to some of these new competitors and not just write them off as being part of some evil empire. There are some lessons to be learned there.
“Their mission is not to grow”–I’d never thought of it that way. A provocative statement.
I agree completely that education should not be more like business, at least, not like businesses of the industrial age. But that raises a question: can we scale institutions whose mission is not to grow? Or to put it another way, how can we reawaken our culture to the value of institutions whose mission is not to grow?
Gardner, Good point.
I still think of undergraduate colleges to be the gold standard, but I’m concerned that we’ve become so fixed in our ways that we’ve lost the ability to humanize the experience. Some students may benefit most from four years at college, but those who come with 60 AP credits could probably get through faster. It might be possible for our students to alternate time on campus with time away in internships, self-directed learning or meaningful work. I don’t know that every institution needs to grow in the number of students who enroll or graduate, but I think we need to be careful not to restrict our mission because we’re unjustifiably self-satisfied.