Unorthodox University of Phoenix Is Hot

There’s no football team or basketball team, no drama club, no rows of dormitories filled with boisterous freshmen at the University of Phoenix.

With an average age of about 35, most of the university’s 32,000 students are too old for competitive sports anyway--and far too busy. They are working professionals who earn undergraduate and advanced degrees primarily in business and management programs through evening and online classes at three dozen branch campuses in 11 states and Puerto Rico.

Now in its 20th year, the school boasts the second-largest enrollment of any private university in the nation, behind New York University.

School President “Bill Gibbs says the University of Phoenix will have 100,000 students by the year 2000, and I believe it,” said John G. Sperling, the school’s founder.

Sperling, 75, taught economics at Ohio State University and San Jose State University before starting the University of Phoenix. He saw a need for a college for the “tens of thousands, if not millions” of working people who wanted to further or finish their educations but couldn’t adjust their schedules around daytime classes offered by traditional universities.

He introduced concepts considered almost radical for the time.

No class could be larger than 15 students. Faculty had to have extensive work experience in their fields and teach the school’s standardized lessons. No tenure was offered. “Anyone caught lecturing will be shot,” Sperling warned his instructors.

The main campus is decidedly un-campus like--a pair of handsome brick towers that include classrooms. Some campuses are in even less auspicious surroundings, such as strip malls.

Students typically take one five-week course at a time. Each student is a member of a small study group and is responsible for individual and team results. Most students devote 15 to 20 hours a week to school work.

Students around the country have access via computer to thousands of articles and journals in the school’s electronic library, located at headquarters. Library employees also fax requested material to students.

Tuition is comparable to traditional colleges. Depending on the degree, University of Phoenix undergraduate students pay around $8,000 a year. Online studies are the most expensive at about $24,000 for a two-year MBA.

“They make it very easy for someone who maintains a full-time job in the day to go back to school in the evening and structure their own time toward getting a degree,” said Ike Schneider of Phoenix, a recent graduate. His employer, Alliant Food Service, paid for his master’s in business administration with emphasis on technology management.

The University of Phoenix has helped make Sperling rich. His fortune is estimated at $300 million, held mostly in the publicly traded stock of the school’s owner, Apollo Group Inc. Sperling is chairman and chief stockholder.

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The school, and its accelerated learning approach, have detractors. Some dismiss it as “McEducation” and a diploma mill.

Mimi Stephens, who earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from the university’s branch in Albuquerque, has heard the criticism. She chose the Phoenix-based school over the business school at the University of New Mexico, where she now works as an administrator in the anthropology department.

“I think that if they are not equal, the University of Phoenix is slightly superior, but that’s a subjective view,” Stephens said.

Some people at the University of New Mexico business school consider the University of Phoenix inferior, “but I think perhaps it’s a factor of competition,” she said.

Sperling shrugs off the criticism as sour grapes from academicians who refuse to acknowledge that his methods work. He notes that his school has been accredited since 1978 by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

Sperling contends that a degree from the University of Phoenix is as prestigious -- and affordable -- as a diploma from the best of the nation’s universities, private or public.

“There’s no difference between an Arizona State University and University of Phoenix MBA,” Sperling said. “The curriculum is almost the same. The only difference is that the ASU student has to go find a job and our students already have a job.”

The school’s growth proves that employers, most of whom pay for at least part of the tab for their workers’ study, are satisfied, Sperling said.

AT&T; Corp. has sent thousands of employees to the University of Phoenix to further their educations, said June Maul, director of global business education for AT&T; in Somerset, N.J.

“We like them because they are focused on the adult learner who has work experience,” Maul said. “It’s very valuable and immediately applicable, and they discuss issues that are real to the employees in their day-to-day jobs.”

Sperling predicts that about half of the school’s students will earn their degrees via the Internet in just a few years. Before long, a class of students, each at a computer in a different city, will use interactive video to communicate with their instructors, he said.

“We will become more and more an international university,” Sperling said. “The electronic media will allow us to reach out to almost any place in the world.”