Blythe’s University Experiment Will End in Failure After 2 Years

For as long as anyone can remember, college dreams tended to wither in the dusty heat of this small desert town near the Arizona border.

Then, civic leaders hatched a bold experiment: They invited a private, liberal arts university program to come to town, putting bachelor’s degrees within easy reach of locals.

Now, after just two years of operation, Blythe’s experiment is ending in failure. Park University-Blythe, the town’s own little four-year university, will close for good in July. The reason? Lack of interest.

All over the country, rural students are less likely to attend college than their suburban counterparts. Geography is often blamed--the cost and difficulty of commuting to a distant campus or moving. But the failure of the Park program suggests that the reasons may be far more complicated.

“I wish I could put my finger on what it was,” said Dorothea Thompson, assistant superintendent of the local school district and one of the university program’s early supporters. For her, the program’s failure is a troubling sign of Blythe’s limited horizons.

“Maybe this is an unfair statement, but I don’t think education is valued here as it should be,” she said, sighing.

The baccalaureate program needed just a few dozen students to succeed, but it never drew more than a handful to its quarters on the local community college campus. Next month’s graduation ceremony--Park’s first and last--will honor just seven students. Six more are expected to finish degrees through independent study.

Backers are left to wonder what went wrong. Scores of people had said they wanted to earn degrees at Park University. About 60 people even went so far as to apply, paying a $25 fee for the privilege.

But when it came time for classes, prospective students melted away, testament to the difficulty of expanding college opportunities in rural areas.

Nearly 100 miles east of Indio on Interstate 10, Blythe has a population of 22,000. More than 8,000 of the residents are inmates in the town’s two state prisons: Chuckawalla Valley and Ironwood.

The biggest employer is the growing prison system, which has brought many new residents. Agriculture is second biggest. Said one resident: You can tell the prison guards by the nice cars they drive.

The town sits on a dry flood plain of the Colorado River called the Palo Verde Valley, staring out to bare desert mountains in the distance. There is a grocery store and a movie theater. Teenagers hang out at the local convenience store or float down the river for fun. The closest major town is Brawley, about 70 miles away.

Remoteness means that students in Blythe who aim for more than an associate’s degree must move away for college, or commute 100 miles or more.

School counselors tell of many students who forgo college because they can’t afford to move or because their families resist.

In other cases they simply have no expectations of college, said Thompson.

“I don’t want you to think of this as a town of stupid people; it isn’t,” she said. “But . . . the general public is not well-educated out here. So they are not insistent on their children going to college or on going themselves.

“People are born and raised here,” she added. “You see lots of extended families--right here, in little, bitty Blythe. They may leave, but they come back.”

Fewer Rural Youths Go to Universities

Blythe high school seniors complete college preparatory classes at 75% the rate of Los Angeles County students. In most years, Palo Verde Community College, with about 2,800 students, transfers fewer than 10 students to any California public university. Certain jobs are hard to fill in Blythe for lack of educated applicants--teachers, in particular.

Blythe is typical of rural towns in this way. Nationally, rural students go to college at about the same low rate as their inner-city peers, said Tom Mortenson, senior scholar at the Center for Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. Suburban children have a 50% chance of reaching college, compared with 39% for rural kids, according to a 1999 study by Mortenson.

It is also true that in Blythe, the advantages of a college degree are not what they might be elsewhere.

John Boyd, a lifelong resident who runs the Park program in Blythe, recalled trying to recruit students from a group of prison guards during a union gathering.

The crowd showed little interest, he said. Afterward, a tough-talking guard lectured him, saying: “Look at the money I make, and I only have a [general equivalency degree],” Boyd said. College, the man told him, “is irrelevant to us.”

“I had no answer,” added Boyd. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology but noted that many of the prison guards earn more than he does. With overtime, it’s not uncommon for those workers to make $60,000 or more a year. They get a $100-per-month incentive to earn associate’s degrees but no additional incentive for a bachelor’s. Nor is the four-year degree required to move up, although some corrections officials say they’d like it to be.

In any case, according to Boyd, some guards deliberately avoid promotion because it could mean less overtime.

Formerly called Park College, Park University is a nonprofit, 125-year-old liberal arts school with about 2,000 students on its Parkville, Mo., main campus. Its strength is extended-learning courses, mostly offered on military bases.

The university agreed to set up a satellite in Blythe three years ago, thanks to efforts led by Don Averill, the president of Palo Verde Community College, and Gary Grimm, a local prison guard and city councilman.

Boyd was hired to oversee the program. He recruited part-time faculty from the thin ranks of local residents with master’s and doctoral degrees. The local judge was among them. Other teachers commuted from distant cities. The first Park classes began in January 1998 on the Palo Verde campus.

Park hoped to draw 100 students, Averill said, and based on the strong initial response of residents, organizers had high hopes.

Disappointment set in early. Plans for a criminal justice degree died because so few local corrections officers enrolled. A liberal arts degree program was only a little more successful.

“It’s very, very frustrating to us,” said Thomas Peterman, vice president for distance learning at Park’s Missouri campus. “We thought it would be a natural . . . but it has not grown the way we hoped it would, and we are not making expenses.”

Blythe residents offer various reasons for the failure. Some say the $118-per-unit fee was too high, though financial aid and employer tuition-reimbursement programs covered the cost for many students who did enroll. People also say the program was hurt by the obscurity of the Park name, and they cite false rumors in town that the program was not accredited.

Most of all, they say Park should have given the experiment more time. Some say they were planning to enroll, but just hadn’t gotten around to it.

“I don’t know if it was a wait-and-see attitude or what,” said Mayor Robert Crain. “But Blythe--sometimes it’s cautious. It’s a very conservative town.”

Fear of Something New Gets Blame

Linda Pratt, 37, a clerical worker at Palo Verde, said: “There was a whole bunch of people who wanted to [enroll] and become teachers and stuff. But . . . there was the fear of it being something new.”

Pratt was among those who expressed interest but never signed up. She grew up in Blythe, worked in a Carl’s Jr. restaurant, married young and always wished she had gone to college--though she doesn’t think it would necessarily have gotten her a better job.

She opted not to enroll at Park because it offered no business classes. Besides, it was hard to get motivated. In Blythe, she said, “people just fall into their jobs, or they work for their dad.”

That’s what her own two sons did. Pratt wishes they would go to college, “but they are boys,” she said, “and, you know, once the boys are out there making money, well . . . there’s no telling.”

Averill, the Palo Verde president, said he is particularly disappointed that Grimm, the councilman who helped bring Park to Blythe, didn’t enroll.

According to Averill, Grimm had said he would be one of the first to sign up. A 44-year-old former contractor, the councilman never got beyond an associate’s degree in his youth, having left college in 1969 to become a VISTA volunteer.

Grimm disputes Averill’s version of the story, saying he never committed to enrolling at Park. Now, in light of the program’s failure, he says he thinks online education may be the answer for Blythe. He says he wants to enroll in an online bachelor’s degree program--”once I finish remodeling my garage.”

Not that Park didn’t have its successes. Students liked the small, intimate classes, and they mostly stuck with them. Most of all, Blythe will now be able to boast seven new college graduates.

Jennifer Wellman, a 35-year-old former motel clerk and waitress, has been working as a city planner since completing the courses for her degree at Park. She loved the university, especially her philosophy class; Voltaire was her favorite.

Earlroy Pride, another student who will graduate next month, said Park was “just what I needed . . . I learned so much.” A disabled former plumber’s assistant and ex-convict, Pride is the single father of four children. He works as an office assistant in the prison system but wants to become a counselor.

Park has said it will do what it can to help the remaining six students complete their course work through individual study plans and Internet courses. And a new Cal State San Bernardino distance-learning program via compressed video transmissions is in the works.

But among the remaining Park students, disappointment is acute. They say there is no substitute for live classes.

Perhaps no one is more frustrated at Park’s closure than Boyd, who will lose his job after July.

When he was a teenager, Boyd’s parents couldn’t send him to college because they “lost everything” farming in Blythe, so he worked for years as a laborer. At 40, he finally left for college--the best experience of his life, he said.

Now, though, he is thinking of applying for a job at one of the prisons--an unappealing prospect. “I don’t see corrections as positive,” he said.

But then again, he added, “I don’t see a lot of options.”