John Ballheim, vice president and campus director of Ashford University, can’t stop saying that the small college he runs here is “so traditional.” He says it frequently during a two-hour interview and tour of the campus, placing a lot of emphasis on the word “so” and comparing Ashford to the small Roman Catholic colleges he worked for some 30 years ago.
Looking around the campus in this city on the Mississippi River, it’s easy to find evidence of that tradition: Crosses still adorn the exteriors of many of the buildings, which once belonged to an order of Franciscan nuns, and a cabinet in the library features religious writings. Plaques commemorating benefactors of Mount St. Clare College, the name of the institution when it was founded in 1918 as a junior college for women, still hang inside buildings—some of which are in the same neglected condition they were in when the college was transferred to new owners in 2005.
But tradition at Ashford is mostly skin deep. The campus here has been transformed from an independent institution into a brick-and-mortar outpost of an online-college empire that enrolls more than 86,000 students across the country and is owned by Bridgepoint Education Inc., a publicly traded company with headquarters in San Diego.
The campus is only a tiny part of the university—about 1,000 students attend classes here, many of them attracted by startlingly generous scholarships. But having a traditional campus that people can see and walk around, a campus where students study in the library and teams run onto the field together for games, appears to be an important marketing tool for Ashford: Pictures of the Iowa campus—of buildings, a commencement, a group of students standing behind an Ashford University sign—are featured in the university’s advertising, which describes Ashford as “a vibrant community that combines a traditional college campus with effective online learning.” The “Our History” timeline on the Ashford Web site extends all the way back to the nuns’ founding of Mount St. Clare in 1918, though Bridgepoint Education was not founded until 1999.
More important, the whole of Ashford University relies on the accreditation that Bridgepoint acquired when it bought the foundering Catholic institution here, reportedly for about $9-million. Without that accreditation, Ashford students would not be eligible for the federal student-aid programs that contribute about 86 percent of Bridgepoint’s $933-million in revenues. according to the company’s annual earnings report.
That, in turn, means the stakes are high for the accreditation drama unfolding this spring: Ashford is applying to move its accreditation from the regional accreditor that oversees institutions in the middle of the nation to the accreditor that approves colleges on the West Coast, where most of the company’s operations are based. The switch is largely due to a requirement from Ashford’s current accreditor that the majority of a college’s administrative and business operations be located within the region.
But the move to a new accreditor creates a risk for Ashford and its corporate parent, which has been vilified by some critics of for-profit colleges—Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, called Ashford “an absolute scam” at a Senate hearing last year. If the new accreditor, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, were to reject Ashford, the company could, at the least, lose a significant amount of its stock value until it finds a new accrediting agency.
The accreditation move also creates a political risk for the new accrediting agency, the Western Association, which will have to prove to the U. S. Education Department and to Democrats in Congress that it has looked thoroughly into Ashford’s academics, finances, and operations and found no serious flaws. The accreditor also faces a related legal risk: If it rejects Ashford, the company is likely to engage in a costly and lengthy court battle.
With such high stakes, the outcome depends, in part, on what a team of Western Association reviewers sees when it visits a campus with just seven buildings in a small city on the Mississippi.
Sacred to Secular
At most traditional colleges, accreditation attracts almost no attention. But Ashford’s accreditation has been controversial since Bridgepoint purchased the college, in 2005, raising concerns that the company was interested only in the accreditation and would neglect the campus. At the time, the company was in the vanguard of for-profit operations snapping up troubled nonprofit colleges mostly for their regional accreditation—in the case of Ashford, provided by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. A year earlier, a group of investors had bought Grand Canyon University, which enrolled about 4,100 students; online offerings have increased the enrollment to nearly 40,000. Another small Iowa institution, Waldorf College, was bought in 2010 by Mayes Education Inc., which also owns Columbia Southern University, in Orange Beach, Ala.
But Ashford is one of the largest online institutions to tie itself to a physical campus, and one of the most successful. Before buying the college, Bridgepoint offered only online courses to students who had completed their associate degrees. Regional accreditation allowed it to expand its offerings to students seeking a full baccalaureate program.
Just as important, regional accreditation gave Ashford a stamp of credibility—it has the same imprimatur as dozens of other small colleges that dot the Iowa landscape. In some ways, Ashford remains similar to its small, nonprofit cousins. The campus sits on a hillside a few blocks from downtown Clinton, a city of about 26,000 supported mostly by agricultural and small manufacturing industries.
It’s the small-campus feel that has brought a number of students here, particularly from Chicago and its suburbs. Dominique Fisher, finishing her second year at Ashford, grew up in Chicago and is studying counseling psychology. She says that she was accepted at Iowa State University and Chicago State, but that her mother thought it would be good to start out at a smaller college not too far from home.
Other students say they appreciate the close interaction with the college’s 55 full-time faculty members, about a dozen of whom worked for Mount St. Clare before it was purchased. Andrew Herrick, a freshman from Greencastle, Ind., heard about Ashford from one of his mother’s friends. He is in his second semester studying sports management and business administration, and says faculty members at Ashford were helpful with both academic and personal issues. “You’re not just another number,” he says, “like at the University of Iowa.”
In many ways, however, Ashford is far different from most private, nonprofit colleges. Faculty members do not have tenure and are forbidden by corporate policy to speak to a reporter without consent from the college’s administration. Mr. Ballheim, the vice president, says the company’s policy is meant to prevent faculty members from revealing information that could lead to insider trading, although several securities lawyers call that an unlikely scenario.
Another difference is that the campus, while tidy, lacks many of the amenities common nowadays at traditional nonprofit colleges. There is no bank of computers in the library to access digital resources; the “bookstore” sells no books, only an array of sportswear with the college’s name; the student-recreation room has just a Ping-Pong table, some chairs and couches, and a flat-screen television.
The Cost of Credibility
There’s an important reason that Ashford University is able to attract students to its campus: Bridgepoint, which is projecting revenues of more than a billion dollars this year, pays full tuition—about $16,000 per year—for any student on the campus with a GPA of 3.5 or higher. Those with GPA’s of 3.25 to 3.49 receive scholarships for nearly 80 percent of tuition, and students with GPA’s between 3 and 3.24 get scholarships worth more than 60 percent of tuition. Information from Ashford says more than three-quarters of the students on the campus receive such merit scholarships,
The scholarship program has also helped the college diversify the student population here and, at the same time, build its athletics program, Mr. Ballheim says. In 2011 there were 57 foreign students, from 24 countries, according to the university. And a large number of those international students were receiving academic scholarships.
They are also coming to Ashford to play soccer, Mr. Ballheim says. The company has built a new soccer field with artificial turf surrounded by an all-weather track. Bridgepoint also bought the local YMCA’s indoor tennis facility for use by the college, a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics. Ashford fields a total of 17 varsity sports for both men and women.
Spending on campus maintenance, however, seems to lag behind spending on scholarships and sports. St. Clare Hall, where the main administrative offices and most of the classrooms are, has been renovated, with the latest classroom technology and walls that the students and teachers can write on. The 1998 Durgin Educational Center, the newest building on the campus, houses a few classrooms, modern athletics training facilities, and an indoor field house with a basketball court and track. And to accommodate the growing number of students on the campus, Ashford bought a nearby Best Western hotel and to use as a dormitory.
But another gym, still in use on the top floor of the student-life building, has holes in the exterior walls. The science laboratories on the lower level of another building appear bare of technology and might generously be described as vintage. The upper level of the library is spacious and well lighted—a fine place for students to study. But the library’s books—about 100,000, the college says—are all in a narrow room on the lower level, with just a few desks for studying. On one staircase at the library, a paper sign warns patrons not to use the railing.
“We have a physical facility that went through 40 years of delayed maintenance,” Mr. Ballheim says, although he notes that some science classrooms are now being renovated. He declined to say how much the parent company has spent to repair the campus, or what Ashford’s long-term plans for maintenance and construction are.
Meeting Standards?
At traditional colleges, an accrediting team’s site visit plays a central role in determining the institution’s accreditation. It remains to be seen how Ashford’s campus will be viewed when Western Association accreditors visit this spring as part of their review of Ashford’s application.
The accrediting agency says it has enlisted a team of 10 reviewers and will also use an independent auditor to help assess the entire institution, including its online offerings and its business operations in California (the University of the Rockies, another campus owned by Bridgepoint, in Colorado Springs, will remain accredited by the Higher Learning Commission).
Preparing for the accreditation has been a “major undertaking,” Mr. Ballheim says, involving “every part of the organization.” Faculty members, however, are “not deeply involved,” he says.
The value of the campus visit varies with the different regional accreditors, but it can play a very large role in determining the accreditation decision, says Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. But Milton Greenberg, a professor emeritus of government at American University, says the campus visit is often nothing more than a “feel-good exercise.”
“Something done once a decade, in most instances, is sort of like a wedding or bar mitzvah, where you see relatives you prefer not to see but you have to be there. From the standpoint of most colleges and universities, it is a nuisance,” he says.
Ralph A. Wolff, president of the Western Association’s Senior College Commission, has disclosed few details about the process or significance of the site visit here, but he says the accreditors will treat the campus as a branch of the larger online institution. A decision about Ashford’s accreditation will come in June, when the association holds its annual meeting. The association will make public not only its decision, but also, for the first time, its letter detailing its findings.