By traditional standards, the DeVry University campus in this sprawling Central Valley suburb doesn’t look like much.
It consists entirely of a gray building in an office park next to the freeway, 20 miles from the state capital, Sacramento. The library is a room with two short rows of books and a computer. The cluster of classrooms is quiet, bright, and standardized, a cross between a college and a Kinko’s.
But the Sacramento Center, as the campus is called, is booming. Marcela Iglesias, who has been dean since it opened, in 2003, estimates that the campus will exceed its capacity of 825 students within a year, and DeVry officials have begun to search for more space. The University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and other for-profit education providers are also expanding rapidly throughout Sacramento County.
With struggling public institutions and a large and growing population, California is fertile ground for the for-profit revolution. Four counties—Sacramento, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Bernardino—have seen particularly fast growth, accounting for two-thirds of the state’s new for-profit campuses from 2004 to 2008.
A look at the growth of for-profit colleges in the Sacramento region offers a case study in the conditions those colleges look for and the advantages they have in attracting students.
Unmet Student Demand
Ten years ago, Elk Grove was little more than an unincorporated cow town that was easy to drive past. Since then it has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, its growth driven by relatively cheap housing and proximity to Sacramento. In the past decade, it more than doubled in size, to 141,000 people.
Public colleges have been unable to keep up. Sacramento’s community-college district, Los Rios, has added nearly 30,000 students in the past decade, but its four campuses have struggled to build enough new facilities to meet student demand.
“They’re all growing so much it’s ridiculous,” says Susie S. Williams, a Los Rios spokeswoman. The district “has been on a gigantic building spree to try and just meet the enrollment growth as best we could.”
Just outside Elk Grove, many students at Cosumnes River College find that the classes they want are full. The district’s official student-to-counselor ratio is 900 to 1. Even in a state that has long been dominated by public institutions, the impression that community colleges and California State University campuses are large and impersonal has made students more open to other options.
That leaves a wide opening for for-profit colleges like DeVry and Phoenix, which promise students smaller classes, more personal attention, and a clear path to degrees and jobs. Jesus Garcia, a 28-year-old electrical-engineering student at DeVry, says he was drawn by its small class sizes, which let him get hands-on experience with electrical equipment.
“You need that personal interaction,” says Mr. Garcia, an auto mechanic who returned to college to get a better job. “You don’t get that at a CSU or a community college or whatever.”
For-profit colleges can respond quickly to changes in student demand, in part by opening small, strategically located campuses, like the one in Elk Grove, that appeal to students who prefer not to travel far from home. The companies analyze inquiries from prospective students, the locations of potential competitors, and prospects for shared media markets that can help them extend their messages.
Locating a growing campus in an office park has its advantages, says Ms. Iglesias, the DeVry dean. Instead of building expensive new facilities or changing locations, she says, a campus in need of more space can often simply expand into vacant property next door.
Strong Job Market
Just as for-profit colleges can be more geographically nimble than their public counterparts, they are also often quicker to change their curricula to respond to local job-market needs.
In recent years, Sacramento’s growth has produced many jobs in health, business, and criminal-justice fields. Several health-care systems are rapidly expanding their facilities in Elk Grove, creating a surplus of jobs and reflecting a push by hospitals to move care from Sacramento to the suburbs.
For-profit colleges have been quick to capitalize, expanding their programs to meet demand for new nurses and health-care administrators. Non-online enrollment on the University of Phoenix’s three Sacramento campuses has risen more than 50 percent during the last eight years, to 3,400 students, driven in large part by growth in medical and business programs.
Phoenix is trying to gain a higher profile locally by reaching out to high-school counselors and community-college administrators to establish articulation agreements, says Bob Eoff, the university’s vice president for Northern California. In such agreements, one institution agrees to recognize the credits and course work of another.
“When we first started, it was very much nonscientific,” he says. “We would pretty much see a big city, see a niche market, and then expand from there. That’s probably the way Sacramento blossomed. There was a need, so we opened more campuses.”
With continued financial restraints on public colleges in California, Mr. Eoff adds, there is no reason why for-profit colleges will not continue to grow. “If nothing else, we’re getting better at meeting the needs of the community. I don’t see our growth slowing down.”
