Maybe Jerry Falwell was right.
The late evangelist always figured that most people would dismiss anything that started in this little city, where he founded Liberty University.
“They think of my hometown as a rather primitive Blue Ridge Mountain village, a backwater on the James River,” he wrote in his autobiography, Strength for the Journey.
More than four decades after Liberty’s founding, in 1971, few in higher education would count the Rev. Falwell among academe’s historic visionaries. But college leaders, grappling with how to position their institutions for the future, might want to take a closer look at the legacy of Mr. Falwell, who is often better remembered for his divisive reputation as a firebrand conservative.
The little experiment that Mr. Falwell started in his hometown is a pretty big deal now, and the residential campus here does not begin to tell the story. Liberty’s online program boasts nearly 65,000 students, more than any other nonprofit college in the United States, according to federal data. Only the University of Phoenix, the for-profit behemoth with an enrollment of 207,000, trumps Liberty.
At most colleges, the question about online education is no longer so much about whether it will play a role, but rather how big a role and how soon. Nearly three-quarters of academic leaders describe online education as crucial to their institutions’ long-term strategies, a recent national survey found. Yet the traditional classroom experience still dominates. Professors, concerned that face-to-face instruction is pedagogically imperative, can be particularly dubious about scaling up an educational operation to reach a mass audience online.
In contrast, Liberty’s growth feels like a natural extension of Mr. Falwell’s television ministry, which at its zenith broadcast church services to millions of viewers.
To be sure, any lesson the Christian university offers about the future of higher education may be a mixed one. Liberty’s aggressive marketing approach, which feeds a voracious appetite for worldwide online expansion, might strike some as the corporatization of academe run amok. But there is no denying that the university has carved out a distinct online identity in a relatively new market and created an Internet education machine that generates revenues any college would welcome.
“Their success may be that they are not trying to be like everybody else,” says Michael B. Horn, co-founder and executive director for education at the Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. “Higher education is ignoring it at its own risk.”
Liberty’s campus has the feel of a summer camp, sprawled across 7,000 acres on Candler’s Mountain. Here the almost 14,000 students in residence can snowboard year-round on synthetic snow, practice archery on a range of animal likenesses, or just walk the grounds in contemplation, listening to soft choral music that emanates from speakers on lampposts. These are the scenes that permeate Liberty’s marketing materials.
But much of the real business of Liberty University takes place a short drive from the campus, in a setting that is decidedly less bucolic. Tucked inside the River Ridge Mall, in what used to be a Sears, is Liberty’s vast enrollment-management division. More than 800 employees work here, crammed together in row upon row of cubicles. This is the frontline of Liberty’s online-recruitment operation.
The room could easily be confused for a corporate call center. Employees, donning headsets, leave their desks only after providing clearly stated reasons. Scattered among the cubicles are small printed signs that read “Personal Break,” “Lunch,” and “Off the Clock.”
Agents here have one primary focus: Move prospective students, as quickly as possible, through Liberty’s admissions funnel. That process often begins when Liberty purchases a lead from an online search site, such as guidetoonlineschools.com, which sells the university lists of prospective students who have expressed an interest in the institution. Once on the phone with a prospect, recruiters aim to keep their calls to an average of seven to 10 minutes, a former Liberty official explains.
“We have to answer the question, move them through the funnel, and get to the next person,” says Phillip Milakovic, who spent five years working in Liberty’s call center, including as an associate director of admissions. He is now digital-media manager at the Tribeca Marketing Group, where he advises colleges.
Federal rules bar colleges from paying recruiters solely for the number of students they enroll, because such incentives have led to deceptive marketing practices. But Liberty crunches plenty of data to see whether agents are getting students in the door. How long did a call take? How many times was a person put on hold? Why? All of those data points, rigorously tracked by Liberty, are “KPIs,” Mr. Milakovic says, using a corporate initialism for “Key Performance Indicators.”
The most-experienced agents, he says, are adept at re-engaging with a prospective student who seems to have lost interest in Liberty. “You never want a person to say, ‘Take me off your list. I never want to be contacted again.’ Then you did something wrong.”
The fruits of all those labors are celebrated nearby. In the call center’s main lobby, plaques on a wall chart Liberty’s online enrollment over the past eight years: 13,000, 14,000, 26,000, 55,000 … Engraved at the top are the words, “God has blessed us.”

Ryan Stone
Jerry Falwell Jr.: “We’re using technology to take it to the next levels.”
Since Mr. Falwell’s death, in 2007, Liberty has been under the leadership of his son, Jerry L. Falwell Jr. Slender and soft-spoken, he bears little resemblance to his father. He accepts the ambassadorial duties of the college presidency, but rather begrudgingly. He describes public speaking, which his father relished, as terrifying.
It is clear, though, that Mr. Falwell took some lessons from his old man. As an evangelist, Jerry Falwell exploited a relatively new medium to extend the church experience to a mass audience. That formula continues to inform Liberty’s business model.
“Again, we’re using technology to take it to the next levels,” Mr. Falwell Jr. says.
It was not always this way. At several points during Liberty’s relatively short history, the university appeared on the verge of collapse. In its early days, it relied on revenues from the Old Time Gospel Hour, the Falwell television ministry. But donors closed their wallets after a series of scandals involving religious broadcasters, notably Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.
“As those ministers fell, all televangelists were judged guilty by association,” Mr. Falwell Sr.’s wife, Macel, wrote in Jerry Falwell: His Life and Legacy. “Almost overnight, Liberty lost millions of dollars in financial support.
“Before the ink was dry on the tabloids,” she continued, “we were $82-million deep in short-term debt.”
The picture looks far different today. Moody’s Investors Service, which has a grim view of the financial prospects of many liberal-arts colleges, has described Liberty as a “true outlier” for its enviable market position. From 2008 to 2012, when most colleges were reeling from the recession, Liberty’s operating revenues grew by 630 percent, Moody’s reported.
The university maintains $1.1-billion in reserves, which function like an endowment. That nest egg is on par with the endowments at major research universities, such as Baylor and Tulane.
“We were so broke for so long,” Mr. Falwell says, “we got really good at managing debt. Managing money was new to us.”

Liberty U. was offering distance learning by 1990, a precursor to its online program.
Liberty offered its first online course in 2004, but its experience in distance education dates back to 1985. In those days, just a few years after it became regionally accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, the university mailed videotaped lectures and test packets to students. “Turn your living room into a college,” an advertisement proclaimed.
The program appealed to adult learners, setting the stage for Liberty to compete with for-profit colleges, which make much of their money from the same demographic group. Liberty, along with Southern New Hampshire University, stands out among nonprofit institutions for its success in enrolling these students online.
“By 2005, when everybody started getting high-speed Internet in their homes, we were just poised in the perfect position to serve that huge market of adults,” Mr. Falwell says.
The words roll easily from Mr. Falwell’s mouth: “Market.” “Customers.” Compared with the marketing approaches of a lot of colleges, Liberty’s may seem brash. The university says it has declined to join several major college associations because some national groups set limits on how many T-shirts, water bottles, and other goodies can be handed out at recruitment fairs.
Liberty’s corporate culture would not suit every college, but the university does do a few things that would work anywhere. For one, Liberty knows its audience. The typical online student, its surveys show, is 36 years old, has some previous college experience, and wants an education with a touch of Christian values. So Liberty has built its programs to serve that demographic, offering courses in eight-week sessions, which its data show students prefer over longer traditional semesters. A standard syllabus, even in a course with no obvious religious connection, encourages students to pray in online forums.
Indeed, Liberty’s online-enrollment boom and its evangelical mission are inextricably tied. Administrators describe the university’s work as a sophisticated soul-saving endeavor. They are “Training Champions for Christ,” Liberty’s ubiquitous motto proclaims.
Shayne L. Lee, a co-author of Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace, says the university’s mission “makes ambition more palatable.”
“They want to be powerful; they want to be good,” says Mr. Lee, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Houston. “And that success can always be couched as bringing more souls to the Gospel.”
That is precisely what Elmer L. Towns says Liberty is doing. Mr. Towns, Liberty’s co-founder, keeps an office in the university’s mall outpost. On a recent Friday afternoon, he is downright giddy as he navigates the maze of cubicles.
“You’ve got to see this,” he says, ducking into an expansive room of recruiters.
Mr. Towns, 82, is a legend at Liberty. He has been here from the start, serving first as executive vice president and then as dean of the School of Religion and the seminary. As he paces the halls, sporting a blazer over his pale-blue-and-yellow argyle sweater, young employees stop what they’re doing and smile reverently at him.
“I see 100,000 people being reached for Christ,” Mr. Towns says, staring with wonder across the room. (By its own enrollment calculation, the university has more than 95,000 students. That figure, which includes students who enroll throughout the year, is significantly higher than federal numbers, which are based on a fall head count).

Les Schofer
The Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., who founded Liberty U., watches a football game with his son Jerry Jr. in 1974.
Mr. Towns never expected this little project to become a higher-education juggernaut. But his good friend Jerry Falwell Sr. did everything big. Mr. Falwell wanted the biggest church, the biggest college, and the biggest political force, which he marshaled through the Moral Majority, a coalition of Christian conservatives.
How much of this university’s trajectory, from the beginning, was about Jerry Falwell, the man, having to have the biggest college in the country? And how much of it was about Jerry Falwell, the evangelical, driven by some higher sense of spiritual purpose? Separating the two, Mr. Towns suggests, misses the point.
“The Bible says we have this treasure in earthen vessels,” Mr. Towns says. “We’re all human. We all have an ego. I have an ego, you have an ego, Jerry had an ego. God can use an ego for his glory, and I think God used Jerry’s ego.”
Mr. Falwell was a practitioner of “saturation evangelism,” which Mr. Towns describes as “using every available method to reach every available person at every available time.”
Mr. Towns turns another corner and walks under a sign that reads “LU En Espanol.”
“Buenos días,” he says to a handful of women speaking Spanish on their headsets.
Compared with the rest of its operations, the work force of Liberty’s bilingual program is paltry. But no space gets Mr. Towns more excited than this nook, which he sees as the entry point for thousands of future students from South America.
Liberty’s worldwide outreach is no trivial matter for Mr. Towns, who says he believes that Jesus Christ will return to earth only when the Gospel is shared with all people. If Liberty succeeds, he says, the end times will come.
“That’s my passion,” he says. “To see Liberty carry out the Gospel to the whole world.”
When Liberty went full-bore into online education, there was some pushback from professors. As on any campus, there were concerns about whether the university’s high-touch residential experience, which promises spiritual growth along with educational attainment, could be translated online.
But Liberty went ahead anyway.
That fact alone is one reason that higher-education traditionalists may dismiss its success. The university is “nimble,” Mr. Falwell says, largely because professors do not have tenure and therefore do not have much say in “management decisions.” That sort of talk might get a college president in trouble on a campus with a more powerful faculty.
“The online program, I’m not sure that a university with tenure could implement something like that,” Mr. Falwell says. “Even our faculty was against it, because it’s new, it’s not traditional, it’s not what they’re used to. But eventually they embraced it.” (Liberty’s law school has tenured positions, but only because accreditation requires it.)
There are nearly 600 professors on Liberty’s residential campus, and they are responsible for developing the curriculum. But an army of nearly 2,300 instructors teaches those courses across the virtual world.
Translating a residential-college experience into an online program can be a tricky piece of business for any college, but the challenge is particularly stark at Liberty. The university is known for—and sometimes criticized for—a stringent set of rules that govern the conduct of students.
“The Liberty Way,” as it is known, is a 20-page document that bars residential students from drinking, smoking, using profanity, “involvement with witchcraft,” and viewing R-rated movies. (Exceptions have been granted for that last rule because administrators have decided that some films, like American Sniper and Braveheart, are worthy viewing).
Liberty’s rules would be impossible to enforce with students across the world, and officials say they are not necessary for the largely adult population taking courses online. But online students do sign an honor code, which goes beyond issues of academic dishonesty and into the touchy area of bedroom behavior. An online student at Liberty swears off “nonmarital sexual relations” and “morally inappropriate sexual misconduct.”
The president is particularly sensitive about discussing the university’s conduct code, which he says has been unfairly characterized as overbearing. He sees criticism of the rules as just one more example of the outside world dismissing the university because it is different. “Religious bigotry,” he says, obscures the things Liberty has done right, and arguably better than most.
Yes, Liberty holds a Christian worldview.
Yes, Liberty aggressively pursues students.
Yes, Liberty is consumer-driven.
And yes, Liberty has grown faster than just about any other nonprofit college in the country.
“We’ve always sort of been the cowboy,” Mr. Falwell says. “We do it our own way.”
Lessons From Liberty
While Liberty University’s evangelical mission and wholesale embrace of corporate marketing set it apart from other colleges, here are several lessons the rest of higher education can take away from the institution’s online success:
Align Programming and Mission
Every online student at Liberty takes at least nine credit hours with a biblical emphasis, tying the university’s mission to its programming. “That is a critical factor in their success,” says Richard A. Hesel, a principal at Art & Science Group, which consults colleges on marketing.
Differentiate
Any college that defines itself more narrowly, as Liberty has done with its Christian mission, necessarily turns off some prospective students. But the brand is stronger for it. “There are too many places that want to be all things to all people,” Mr. Hesel says.
Export the Ethos Online
Students on Liberty’s residential campus are part of a tight-knit community. “Convocation,” for example, is a thrice-weekly event where all students come together for music, guest speakers, and prayer. Video of convocation is streamed online so that all students can participate virtually.
Know Your Market
Liberty’s online students are 36 years old on average, and they want flexibly scheduled courses with a touch of Christian values woven into the content. The university has built its programs to serve this population.
Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.