Essay Question: The Web is Transforming the University. How and Why? (Please Use Examples.)
By Paul Keegan, December 2000 Issue
This man runs the largest private university in the United States. You may never have heard of University of Phoenix, but it's using the power of the Internet to lay siege to the ivory tower. To its students, UOP is a godsend. To critics, it's sacrilege. And to prestigious institutions from Columbia to Stanford, it's a new business plan.
It's the first week of school, and already I'm in a fight with another student.
I'm taking a graduate course in organizational behavior, trying to get a feel for the modern American university. Things start off innocently enough as we take turns introducing ourselves: Ellen says she's 26 years old, loves college football and baking cookies, and feels way over her head as a sales manager responsible for 16 employees ("Why is this so hard for me?"). Lorne is a 32-year-old guy with a fuzzy brown goatee and oversize glasses who proudly shows us pictures of his newborn baby. Dennis is a solid, earnest fellow who's in great shape at 45, swimming every day at 5 a.m. before going to work at a big telecommunications company.
But then Dennis happens to mention that he feels inadequate compared with all the other "terrific individuals" in this class, so I say don't worry, everybody's probably wildly exaggerating their backgrounds, just like they do on resumes -- just kidding around, you know -- when suddenly this guy named Mike goes nuts. He's a 42-year-old emergency-room doctor who could probably use some sedatives himself, if you ask me, because he immediately starts accusing me of undermining the classroom's open, trusting atmosphere. "I have neither a need to boast," Mike says, "nor do I suffer a lack of self-esteem necessitating a less-than-candid and truthful communication in class."
Can you believe this guy? But even in the heat of the moment, our feud never gets the least bit physical, largely because Mike was letting me have it from somewhere in Tokyo, while I'd been cutting up in class from my computer screen in New York.
Transoceanic bickering among students at the world's largest virtual university is just one of many strange episodes taking place in the hallowed halls of academia these days. The Internet has been sending shock waves shuddering up the ancient ivory tower, and no school has exploited the Net's potential more than the one I'm exploring, University of Phoenix Online, which is owned by a publicly traded company called the Apollo Group with a stock market valuation of some $2.8 billion.
Apollo is run by a 79-year-old former history professor named John Sperling, whose stock in the company is now worth more than $400 million. He enjoys nothing more than rebelling against the traditional academic establishment. His university, with 15,000 students online and 75,000 more attending his bricks-and-mortar campuses in 15 states, Canada, the Netherlands, and Puerto Rico, has been accredited since 1978, but in the last several years it has mushroomed into the nation's largest private university. At its present growth rate, within five years Apollo will have 100,000 online students and annual sales of well over a billion dollars; its campus classrooms alone would have more students than the biggest public university system in California or New York.
Sperling, who delights in calling his students "customers," has accomplished all this without a full-time tenured faculty -- classes are taught by an army of 7,000 part-time "facilitators" like Bob Arganbright, a business consultant who's leading my class from his home in San Diego. Even those 75,000 customers who attend real classrooms go to campuses that are little more than generic office buildings, with no adjoining football stadiums, no physical libraries, no dormitories, and no quads with wide green lawns. The online branch I'm attending, of course, doesn't even have classrooms, and its enrollment is already 15 times larger than that of its nearest online competitor and growing so fast -- 50 percent a year, almost double the rate of the physical campuses -- that Apollo spun the branch off as a separate tracking stock in September.
University of Phoenix has been derided as a "diploma mill" and "McUniversity" for creating a fast-track curriculum that allows working adults to get degrees almost as quickly as full-time students. Critics argue that Apollo has always been more interested in pleasing shareholders and squeezing 20 to 40 percent profit margins from its schools than ensuring that its students get a good education.
But to its customer base of adults -- you have to be 23 years old to be admitted -- UOP has been a godsend. My new classmates Ellen, Lorne, Dennis, and Mike all say their lives are so busy that they probably couldn't get their degrees any other way. Even the university's unusual pedagogy, which stresses group learning and real-world experience, is finally gaining respect from peer institutions. Much of the animosity toward Apollo, Sperling's defenders say, has come because he has trounced traditional academia in serving the burgeoning adult market that now makes up about half of the nation's college students. Quite simply, he's stealing their customers and getting filthy rich in the process .
University of Phoenix's total student body of about 90,000 may not seem like much until you realize how deeply fragmented the higher-education industry is. It's an enormous pie -- $225 billion in revenue annually -- that's currently being carved up among 4,000 public and private institutions. The industry garners a huge customer base of 14.5 million students, but the largest nonprofit, the University of Texas at Austin, has only 49,000 of them.
It's an industry, in other words, begging to be dominated by a handful of companies using the Web's magic word -- scalability. But Sperling got the idea to mass-produce higher learning a long time before the Web came along. In the mid-1970s, he created a standardized curriculum, owned by the university, that could be cheaply replicated on campuses across the country. Building bricks-and-mortar campuses, in retrospect, was doing it the hard way. When he founded University of Phoenix Online in 1989, Sperling realized that reaching tens of thousands of students with his one-size-fits-all curriculum could take place as quickly and easily as clicking a mouse.
When the Web arrived in the mid-1990s, lots of people suddenly got the same idea. Today there are hundreds of dotcom startups creating online courses, all fighting for a piece of that huge higher-ed market. And every school from Harvard University to your local community college is exploring the Internet, with more than 3,000 institutions now offering Web classes. Big media companies like publisher Harcourt General and the British conglomerate Pearson PLC also are rapidly moving in. (Pearson's online-education venture involves America Online, which has agreed to buy Time Warner, eCompany Now's parent company.)
Sperling's early success, combined with the recent stampede to the Web by traditional institutions afraid of being left behind, has made it clear that the Internet is causing a fundamental shift in the way students are learning. This has triggered soul-searching in campuses across America. The debate is framed in the histrionic extremes you'd expect from the professoriat: Are universities selling out their sacred educational mission? Will the education industry ultimately be swallowed up by a small number of giant corporations whose mission is not nurturing minds but maximizing profits? Or does the Net present a golden opportunity to revolutionize scholarship and education?
"This is the third great paradigmatic shift in learning history," argues Frank Moretti, head of the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University, one of the leaders in embracing the Web. (The first two great paradigmatic shifts were the inventions of the Greek alphabet in the eighth century B.C. and Gutenberg's press in the 15th century.) "Now we have the chance to reinvent education and create something better," Moretti adds.
"Education is not what all this is about," retorts David F. Noble, a history professor at York University in Toronto and author of a series of articles called "Digital Diploma Mills." "It's about making money. This could be the end of the university as we know it."
It's easy to miss the main campus of University of Phoenix. Tucked away on a little road just off Interstate 10, it consists of three red-brick buildings with a small courtyard, a splashing fountain, and some shade trees. Its 2,000 students walk around as though they were going to the office.
The same bland atmosphere can be found at the other 97 brick-and-mortar UOP campuses. "It's sort of like a Wal-Mart education," says James Perley, who heads the American Association of University Professors's accrediting committee. He does not mean this as a compliment. The school's semester-long subjects are broken into manageable chunks of five- or six-week courses, and you have to go to class only once a week for four hours. Tuition isn't cheap -- a graduate student taking seven courses during a calendar year would spend about $6,500 and get 40 percent of the credits required for an MBA. That's generally more than the annual tuition at a public university but less than at a private school (most UOP students are reimbursed by their employers). Phoenix offers an associate's degree in general studies, bachelor's degrees in business, information technology, nursing, and counseling, master's degrees in all those subjects plus education, and even a Ph.D. in business management. Ask why there are no libraries, and university officials will say they're unnecessary -- a wide range of publications is available online from the school's Learning Resource Center. If you ever need an actual book, they'll help you get it from a local public library.
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