Kensington U. Majoring in Controversy

Kensington University has no classrooms, laboratories or dorms. Its students don’t play football, join fraternities or linger dreamily on a quadrangle. In fact, the entire campus is housed in a small office building here, with not an ivy-covered wall in sight.

Recruiting from throughout the nation, the school runs a program in which people studying at home can earn anything from a bachelor’s degree to a doctorate--all without attending a single class or meeting their instructors face to face.

To owner Alfred Calabro, Kensington’s “no fat, no bull” correspondence method reflects the future of higher education: serving students who want to expand their knowledge but can’t afford to put their careers and bills on hold.

To state regulators, however, Kensington awards advanced degrees “which may have little, if any, academic value” and has been perpetrating a “fraud on the public.” For two years, they have been trying to shut down the feisty, 20-year-old institution, which has managed to stave off a closure order at least until a court hearing Thursday.

The dispute, many academics say, reflects broader changes looming in higher education, where the traditional ways of learning are increasingly being challenged, as are long-held assumptions about what constitutes a quality education.

Driven by telecommuting technology and student demand, conventional universities are turning to nontraditional programs. As those courses begin to resemble programs offered by places such as Kensington, some say students and regulators will have a tougher time telling the good from the bad.

“We may see a very different world,” said Warren Fox, executive director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC), an advisory panel. “We are going to have a larger slice of the pie delivered by nontraditional means. That’s not bad. But it’s going to get more complicated.”

Kensington’s battle is a direct outgrowth of the state’s lively potpourri of ideas, politics and approaches to education, underscoring some of the best and worst aspects of that freedom. Embracing the unconventional, California by the 1970s had become a hotbed of small, private colleges offering easy degrees, with more such institutions than any other state, according to CPEC.

During the 1980s, California gained a reputation as “the diploma-mill capital of the world,” as one state study put it. In 1989, the Legislature passed tougher regulations and later created the Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education to enforce them.

Kensington fell under the council’s oversight as part of a little-known tier of about 250 private, degree-granting schools with about 100,000 students statewide. Most are small and many, like Kensington, are operated for profit.

But none have accreditation--an educational seal of approval--from a private oversight group called the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges. So under California law, Kensington and the others must undergo periodic reviews and obtain the council’s approval to operate.

That’s where Kensington ran into trouble. Its first state review, in 1994, found many problems, including routine acceptance of below-par student work, awarding inflated credit for so-called “life experience,” and not having enough faculty. “Academic rigor is not present,” the review concluded.

In one case, reviewers found the school had awarded credit to a doctoral candidate in psychology for reading magazine articles and writing about a dozen short reaction papers. A later report said the school also awarded doctoral degrees after as little as four months’ work.

In other violations cited by the state, an environmental-science student received 52 credits for unspecified life experience, although the legal limit is 30 credits. The same three instructors were reviewing all doctoral dissertations, regardless of the subject, even though the usual academic practice is for the person critiquing a dissertation to be an expert in the field. And regulators found the master’s thesis of one education-program graduate to be replete with factual errors.

“When you have to read through this stuff, you say, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” said Elena Ackel, a Los Angeles legal aid attorney who is vice chairwoman of the Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education.

Calling the state’s rules for such schools minimal, she added: “It’s not like we’re trying to make one of these degrees be equivalent to UC Berkeley.”

Nor do Kensington’s students expect a blue-chip education--just a practical one--according to several alumni who said they were satisfied with their experiences.

One Kensington graduate, Cal State Los Angeles professor Martin Roden, conceded that today his unaccredited doctorate would probably preclude him from his current post. He obtained the degree in 1982, long after his 1968 appointment.

“Certainly from my experience with them, they’re not a fraud,” said Roden, who teaches electrical engineering. “But certainly no one going there would be compared to someone with a UCLA degree.”

Another alumnus called Kensington’s no-nonsense approach a refreshing change from the traditional law school he had left.

“I was thankful they were there so I could pursue my educational goal and feed myself at the same time,” said Billy Rutherford, a Fullerton legal assistant who graduated from Kensington’s law program in 1993.

Kensington President Clive Grafton admitted that there were problems when the state reviewed the school, but said he has worked to resolve them by eliminating the school’s weak environmental-science and psychological-counseling programs and increasing the faculty from about 30 to 45. Because the unflattering review was its first under the state’s new standards, Grafton said Kensington deserved more time to improve.

But state officials disagreed.

The council issued Kensington its first closure order in 1994, but owner Calabro, an attorney, quickly had it blocked in court. Last December, the council reissued its order, only to have Calabro again convince a judge that the school deserved a grace period. Earlier this month, Kensington filed a legal motion that accuses the state of persecution and seeks a minimum of two more years to operate and make improvements.

Although Kensington is one of many state-regulated schools to face closure orders (or to leave California altogether), state officials said their fight with the school has become one of the longest and most hotly contested--in part because owner Calabro is an attorney.

Around Glendale, Calabro’s independent spirit is well known. One of the longest-practicing attorneys in town, since the 1950s, he gained notoriety by running against Ira Reiner for Los Angeles County district attorney in 1988, after Reiner criticized Calabro’s brother, Daniel, a Glendale court commissioner.

Calabro, who worked his way through Southwestern University School of Law, founded Kensington in 1976 based on a sense that traditional university programs did not meet the needs of working adults. Their daytime classes interfere with work, he figured, and urban campuses do not serve people in remote areas.

So Calabro conceived Kensington’s “accelerated” approach for working adults. Or as he once said in an interview: “A guy who is selling polyurethane parts doesn’t have to take a foreign language to graduate.”

To its current 650 enrollees, Kensington offers no classes in foreign languages, music, the arts, physical education or other academic froufrou--just the basics of business, law, education and psychology, among other disciplines that lead more directly to jobs. Tuition ranges from $2,900 to nearly $4,500 for entire degree programs. The school claims more than 7,000 graduates.

Kensington took in about $1.2 million in tuition and reported a $25,000 profit for the 12-month period ending in early 1994, according to its most recent financial disclosure report to the state. Most faculty members work part-time and hold other jobs, grading their students’ work at home.

“Admittedly, Kensington is not the ideal,” said Garnet Birch, an education consultant and former college administrator who works as an instructor at Kensington.

“But it really does meet a need for students who are trying not to beat the system, but to fulfill their professional and personal goals in a manner the traditional systems do not provide,” said Birch, who added that he regularly speaks to his students by telephone from his home in Temecula.

“Do you know how difficult it is to conform your lifestyle to going back to school to get a degree?” Birch asked. In traditional schools, he said, it’s: “To hell with your lifestyle. You now have to drop out of your life for a year or two.”

Students study on their own, reading textbooks received by mail and sending back written tests, typically only one or two per class. Participants proceed at their own pace, rarely interacting with other students, and typically talk with their teachers occasionally by phone.

That approach might not work for an 18-year-old straight out of high school. But Grafton, Kensington’s president and a former education professor at USC, said that adult students, who have often put in years in the work force, can learn on their own. “This is not for everybody. But it does meet a need for some people.”

In the past, educators believed it was simple to distinguish quality college programs from questionable ones: Students who spent enough time sitting in classrooms on campuses and completing assignments were learning, while the nontraditional schools were suspect.

The spread of cable-television-based instruction, two-way video conferencing and the Internet has made classroom attendance less crucial. The line dividing schools such as Kensington from Cal State branches, for example, has become blurred.

But many educators argue that the line has not yet disappeared. While Kensington offers little student-faculty interaction, other nontraditional and high-tech programs around the country do provide that human contact.

Penn State University and the University of Iowa have begun a joint program in which students can obtain undergraduate degrees through independent study at home. Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey is a leader in so-called “distance learning.” All three schools, however, maintain some level of student-faculty interaction.

“There has to be more to education than passing exams,” said David Winter, president of Westmont College in Santa Barbara and a leader of the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges. He said research has shown that interaction is one of the most powerful influences on students’ success.

Cal State Northridge recently launched its first class using the Internet, but students studying on their own still communicate regularly with each other and their instructor via computer--something that is not part of any Kensington program.

In nearly a dozen degree programs offered by accredited schools through the cable channel Mind Extension University, interaction with faculty remains a requirement, said network spokeswoman Tracy Hollingsworth. “None of the universities are going to risk their accreditation by doing less than they do on campus,” she said.

Another continuing problem for Kensington is its lack of accreditation. Although not a requirement for private colleges to remain open, accreditation bestows prestige. Students who obtain degrees from unaccredited institutions face “putting a time bomb” on their resumes, said John Bear, author of a national guide to nontraditional college programs.

Kensington’s various degrees in education, for example, are worthless for anyone who wants to teach in California; the state will not give Kensington alumni--or graduates of other unaccredited schools--the necessary credentials. Some school districts, however, will award pay raises and promotions to already-licensed teachers who do graduate work at unaccredited schools.

Author Bear has tallied at least 100 schools across the country that offer accredited off-campus bachelor’s-degree programs (fewer offer off-campus master’s and doctoral degrees). Given that number, he said, “it surprises me that anyone would ever pursue an unaccredited degree.”

Yet Kensington’s students don’t seem to be complaining. Officials with the state council said they have on file only one student complaint against the school, though they declined to discuss details. The Better Business Bureau reports no complaints about Kensington.

Even legal assistant Rutherford, who has yet to pass the state bar exam despite three tries, does not blame his alma mater.

“Do I think it will make me any less of a lawyer?” he said. “I don’t think it will have any effect at all.”