Making it in a mass market

Critics have called it a 'McUniversity', but Phoenix University, founded by John Sperling (right) could be the most significant provider of mass-education in the world. Stephen Phillips reports.

Blink and you could miss America's largest university. Its low-key roadside campuses are the antithesis of Oxbridge's dreaming spires. But then so too is the concept of the University of Phoenix.

There are no Nobel laureates on its faculty, nor does it pioneer cutting-edge research. Its students are hardly the cream of the crop - drawn largely from the ranks of working adults who missed out on university the first time round. In fact, they are not even called students. Instead they are known as "customers", to whom Phoenix offers a stripped-back syllabus of vocational degrees and diplomas to enhance their employment prospects. It is also the only peer-review board-accredited university listed on the stock market, where its profits are the envy of corporate America.

Many US academics turn their noses up at Phoenix, deriding it as a "McUniversity". But it could just be the single most significant mass-education phenomenon of recent times, and the success story is not lost on a growing number of traditional universities mulling how to cash in on their intellectual and cultural capital.

Founded in 1976, some 150,000 students now throng to Phoenix's bricks-and-mortar and virtual classrooms. By comparison, the US's largest public campus, the University of Texas at Austin, has about 50,000 students.

John Sperling, Phoenix's founder and, at 81, still its chairman, nurses a sense of vindication. "People now realise that the University of Phoenix model is that of the future of most of higher education and that they had better copy it or become toast."

The remarkably spry Sperling laces his conversation with the salty wisdom and acerbic observations normally associated with alumni from the school of hard knocks and the university of life. But he had an orthodox academic career before donning a business suit. After studying at Portland University and at Oregon's Reed College as a mature student, he earned a doctorate in modern English history from Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley.

Study represented an escape from the succession of dead-end jobs - including a stint as a roustabout on Portland's docks - which he found himself in after leaving home. He took to higher education with alacrity. "It was like, look ma, no hands," he recalls.

Armed with a PhD, academia represented the "path of least resistance", Sperling says.

Despite such a lack of conviction, he looks back on the ivory tower with fondness - chiefly, it seems, for his extra-curricular exploits. He particularly cherishes his union activism. On the inaugural Earth Day in 1970, Sperling helped his students at San Jose State University bury a car.

It was here, amid the first stirrings of Silicon Valley, that he began research into juvenile delinquency that would lead circuitously to Phoenix. Having spent six years developing a curriculum to hold the attention of miscreant 17 to 18 year-olds, he found it worked better with adult learners to whom he had begun giving after-work lessons.

Although he dismisses "goals or directions", Sperling describes himself as an "implacable opportunist". And an eye for the main chance characterises his post-academic career. After his efforts to sell the adult-learning classes as a recruitment vehicle to San Jose State were spurned, he took his brainchild to the University of San Francisco. The private, Jesuit-owned institution was in financial straits and jumped at the chance of boosting enrolment.

The courses offered a lifeline to the university and emboldened their creator to set up a stand-alone, degree-granting institution.

Phoenix quickly blossomed and in 1981 gained accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission, one of six regional bodies that set standards for US institutions. Today it has 113 US sites, offering bachelors and masters degrees in education, business, information technology, nursing and counselling and a PhD in business management. Sperling boils down the winning formula to a "high-touch" approach. "We are constantly connecting with the students and they with each other," he says.

This entails keeping classes small - optimum 14 - to encourage active participation, and minimising administrative overheads.

Sperling bristles at the suggestion that Phoenix is peddling soulless, strip-mall education. He does not dispute the importance of a rich campus environment for students straight from school. But this is not Phoenix's demographic. "The problem with the critics is that they conflate the purpose of higher education for youths with adults," he says. The typical Phoenix student is mid-30s, in middle management, with a household income of $65,000 to $70,000 (£45,000-£48,000) a year.

Phoenix's fastest-growing offerings are its online courses. Sperling presciently spotted the potential of the internet for distance learning in 1989, setting up the University of Phoenix Online five years before the advent of the web browser. With characteristic predatoriness, he rounded up the architects of an earlier failed web-learning venture and pumped them on how not to offer courses over the internet.

Still, Phoenix Online foundered for five years before turning a corner. Success was finally achieved by pegging online class sizes at nine, permitting students to download course modules instead of having to stay online and coordinating textbook distribution with curricula, Sperling says.

Phoenix Online now has some 40,000 students. But Sperling is sceptical of traditional universities' ventures onto the web, saying they risk cannibalising campus admissions if they offer online qualifications in their own name. "You've got this incredible brand - why dilute it? Parents pay $40,000 a year to send their kid to the institution. If it starts selling degrees over the internet, they'll go bonkers."

Despite Phoenix's success in the Americas, Europe - apart from a minor bridgehead in Holland - has proved a hard nut to crack. Sperling blames the class system and a cultural aversion to studying after work. Nevertheless, it is only a matter of time before Europe succumbs to the "hot breath of American capitalism", he says.

But Sperling is not your run-of-the-mill capitalist. He ploughs his fortune into drug-policy liberalisation referenda to promote legalisation of medical marijuana, and treatment instead of imprisonment for non-dealing drug offenders. Other investments include salt-tolerant technology that would allow crops to be cultivated along the coasts of starving African nations.

The maverick entrepreneur eschews profound psychological explanations of his motivations. "It is sheer animal spirit - the flight from boredom."