Cassandra Leach always planned to go to college. As an honors student and editor of her high-school newspaper, she dreamed of a career in journalism. But after a couple of years at Morgan State University, in Baltimore, she ran out of money and had to leave the historically black college.
Her plans to return dissolved when, at 19, she got pregnant. She eventually got out of a bad relationship with the baby’s father, only to get pregnant again six months later with someone else. Going back to college was a luxury Ms. Leach couldn’t afford.
At a bus stop several years later, she met a woman who worked for the University of Phoenix, who persuaded her to enroll in Axia College, the institution’s associate-degree college.
“It’s been a really long road,” says Ms. Leach.
The University of Phoenix, a for-profit institution that bills itself as a steppingstone to success for working adults, is helping the 26-year-old mother of two to finally get what she wants. She takes all her courses online, working mostly on her own schedule. She can squeeze in studying between caring for her children and—before she got laid off two years ago—working as a customer-service supervisor, even if that means logging in to a virtual classroom at 1 a.m.
Though she has never met any of her classmates, Ms. Leach, who is black, is like many of them. Phoenix students are more likely to be black or Hispanic, female, and working part time or full time than are students at traditional colleges. They are also more likely to be over the age of 24, single parents, and receiving no financial support from their parents.
A decade ago, someone like Ms. Leach might have gravitated toward the community-college system, and many still do. But the for-profit sector, which says it now accommodates nearly 10 percent of students in higher education in this country, has attracted students by focusing on convenience.
Ms. Leach’s experience with “U of P” has not been without hiccups. Her big criticism is the limited interaction with faculty members. And she estimates she will graduate $15,000 to $16,000 in debt, since loans and grants are financing her education. That will add to the $8,000 she owes for Morgan State loans. What matters most to her now, though, is that she will soon be able to check off a major goal: In April she will receive an associate-of-arts degree in business. One week later, she will start on her next degree—a bachelor’s from Phoenix.
Used to Setbacks
On a typical morning, Ms. Leach walks Lilian, her 6-year-old daughter, to school, returns to her cramped and cluttered kitchen to make a cup of coffee, and settles down at her computer. She has to participate in the two courses she is taking by posting to an online class discussion thread four days out of the week. She can respond to either another classmate or the instructor and has to write something substantial. She also has a short assignment due on alternating weeks in each class, as well as a final project for both.
On weekends, her 4-year-old son, Solomon, who lives with his father, comes to visit. Then she does her homework after tucking her kids into their bunk beds. But a few days before Christmas, her laptop crashed.
“I wanted to die inside,” says the normally upbeat woman, who is quick with a laugh and disarmingly open about her personal life, her money woes, and her hopes for the future.
On a frosty, gray January morning, Ms. Leach, who can’t afford a car, has to take a train and then a bus to get from her row house in a Baltimore suburb to Timonium, the closest University of Phoenix center accessible by public transportation. She could go to her public library, but there is a time limit on using the computers there, and printing costs money.
Since getting laid off, Ms. Leach has been living on unemployment benefits. Though her live-in boyfriend helps pay the bills with a job loading appliances onto trucks, she has no money to spare. She even let her Internet service lapse until she can get her computer fixed, so she could save $60 a month. But she can’t get her computer fixed until she can come up with the cash to send the computer, which is still under warranty, back to the manufacturer in Texas.
Now, with her 90-minute commute to the center, the convenience of taking courses online has evaporated. But Ms. Leach does not complain; she is used to setbacks.
The learning center, housed in a glass office building next to a busy highway, is nothing like a traditional college campus. Conference rooms, presumably for classes, are empty of students at this mid-morning hour. Ms. Leach heads to a small business center labeled “student resource room,” where she sits at one of seven empty computer stations.
Over the next hour, only a couple of students drop in. One woman, a bus driver working toward a bachelor’s degree in health-care administration, clicks her tongue when she discovers the printer is broken. After all, students pay a $70 materials fee for every course, which lets them print out documents at Phoenix locations. That is on top of the $1,035 cost of a typical three-credit class at Axia.
Unlike traditional colleges, Axia does not have semesters. Instead, courses are offered in nine-week blocks. Once she wraps up her classes this month, she will have earned 54 out of 60 credits toward her associate degree, including the 18 credits that transferred out of 24 that she earned at Morgan State. At Axia, she has a 3.17 GPA.
“I wish it were higher,” says Ms. Leach, noting that she gets downgraded when she fails to fulfill weekly participation requirements or turns assignments in late. Even when her laptop is working, if her daughter gets an ear infection, or something else gets in the way, she isn’t always able to complete every assignment.
At the learning center, Ms. Leach e-mails an assignment to herself, then downloads it onto her iPod, the closest thing she has to a computer now. She has to come up with a business plan for a fictitious exporting company for her international-business course. She is also taking an introductory-accounting survey course, “The Maze of Numbers.”
When she started classes at Axia, in May of 2008, Ms. Leach felt a little lost, like she was in the middle of her own maze of numbers. Online video tutorials from the college helped refresh her memory of algebra. More recently she found a podcast lecture on the Web from Villanova University that helped clarify concepts in her accounting class. “They definitely encourage you to find outside resources,” she says of her instructors. She hasn’t had time to take any of the dozens of tutorials offered to business students on Phoenix’s library Web site, but appreciates the option. “If I want to train, it’s there,” she says. To succeed at this enterprise, she says, self-direction is crucial. “The teacher is not going to hold your hand.”
What Ms. Leach wishes she could change is how much contact she has with her instructors. If she has a question, she says, it won’t get answered until the next day. She says her instructors often have full-time jobs and families, too. She does have occasional contact with an academic counselor assigned to her by the university, but that is not the same as being able to have a substantive chat online with an instructor.
No Transcript Required
So far the benefits outweigh her concerns. This summer Ms. Leach had to drop out for a month when she ran into financial-aid problems and had to reapply for some loans. She says Phoenix made it easy to start back up. At Morgan State, she remembers spending torturous hours in the bursar’s office.
She has been pleasantly surprised by how streamlined the admissions, enrollment, and financial-aid processes have been at Phoenix. It took only a week or two to apply, a month to get accepted, and another month to start classes. “They really get you in fast,” says Ms. Leach. They did not, for example, require a high-school transcript, as Morgan State did.
While it didn’t worry her that the college did not require essays or transcripts to gain admission, its for-profit status gave her pause. A University of Phoenix recruiter from Texas had called her once, giving her the hard sell. It seemed like he was only trying to reach a quota, she says.
Then she met the woman at the bus stop, a recruiter based at the Timonium learning center. Ms. Leach says the woman seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the institution. And when Ms. Leach found out that Phoenix is accredited, it gave her confidence. So when she gets her diploma this spring, she will be proud.
Her new dream is to become a chef, maybe own a restaurant someday. She hopes that a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management from Phoenix will get her there. Until then, she says, she is content to set an example of perseverance for her children.
In the fall of 2008, when Axia automatically dropped her from a social-science course for lack of participation, she had to start the course all over again. The second time she took it, she failed it. On the third try, Ms. Leach earned a B-. Then she went right on to her next assignment.
