Fire the tenured faculty. Abandon the campus. Lock the library.
Now look at what’s left and answer this question: Who says you can’t make money off the liberal arts?
For traditional colleges gasping to keep humanities programs above water, this vision is Dante’s ninth circle of hell. Here in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, it’s daily life at the biggest liberal-arts mecca you’ve never heard of.
The American Public University System is mapping a new model for sustaining, and even expanding, offerings in liberal-arts subjects like history and philosophy. Its formula: Embed Lincoln and Plato in the belly of a publicly traded corporation that mass-markets moderately priced degrees in many fields, like a higher-ed Wal-Mart. But some of its teaching methods and faculty credentials would raise eyebrows at traditional institutions.
By appealing to a global audience, the for-profit online university has found a fresh market for niche offerings—say, a course on the wars of ancient Rome—that might not draw enough people to fill a classroom in West Virginia. The format attracts students like Marc Sehring, a 40-year-old from Manassas, Va., who abandoned a fine-arts program about 20 years ago and is now raising an infant child. He studies military history at night and applies the knowledge at his day job restoring tanks and other vehicles for military museums. The degree might help him should he slide into a job as a curator at some point, Mr. Sehring says.
“It’s not an Ivy League school,” he says. “But in the long run, it’s what I’m looking for—an education I can do in my time.”
Exploiting the Web to sell obscure products is nothing new. In e-commerce, iTunes and Amazon.com have profited for years from what’s known as the “long tail” of the Internet. But in liberal-arts education, what American Public University does is downright radical.
A Niche Waiting to Be Filled
The national boom in online degree programs has largely left liberal arts behind. Small liberal-arts colleges consider it “a little dangerous for them to offer stuff online” because their selling point is a cozy campus, says A. Frank Mayadas, a veteran e-learning advocate and senior adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. And those colleges that did build online programs, he says, generally assumed that the adults who tend to take online courses wanted degrees related to fields that already employ them. That means strong demand for business, not for French literature.
Mr. Mayadas argues that the conventional wisdom is a myth. Liberal-arts degrees suit many jobs that don’t require a specialized education, he notes. The American Public University System is proving him right by cashing in on one group of professionals that craves degrees for promotion: soldiers.
Two-thirds of the system’s students are active-duty military personnel. They’re driving revenue that shot from $40-million to $107.1-million between 2006 and 2008, according to the company’s most recent annual report to the government. The system, which consists of American Public University and American Military University, doesn’t publish earnings by program. But 22 percent of its 59,300 students, or just over 13,000, are in the School of Arts and Humanities.
To Frank McCluskey, the system’s provost, the question isn’t why a for-profit institution offers philosophy. It’s why more colleges don’t try to keep small humanities programs alive by putting them online.
The provost aspires to do more than provide a convenient way to help captains become majors. With his fast-talking salesmanship, the New York City native can come off like a car dealer. In reality he is a self-described “Proust guy” who used to teach philosophy at Mercy College, in New York. His pitch: Humanities may not rake in cash, but they enrich a university. Mr. McCluskey waxes romantic about the time he went to a pub in Oxford and heard two guys talking about the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine.
“I want to replicate that online,” he says, jabbing the air. “I’m ambitious. I want online Oxford.”
A Student-free Campus
Charles Town feels nothing like Oxford. The quaint town, where the 19th-century abolitionist John Brown was hanged, attracts history buffs. What lured Mr. McCluskey’s university here in 2002 was the opportunity to seek accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, widely seen as a friendly venue by officials in the for-profit sector. The university occupies a restored courthouse, a former hospital, and several other red-brick buildings on a side street downtown. It feels like a campus vacated for spring break—except the students are never coming back.
For those students, the real campus is a Web page that features blue logos and a coffee-cup icon for the “lounge,” which, like much of their college life, consists of an online discussion board. Traditionalists question how well this set-up lends itself to teaching a qualitative subject like history. How can you replicate the classroom give-and-take that helps students learn to interpret texts?
“We have that,” argues Brian Blodgett, program director for undergraduate history and military history. In a conference room here, he logs on to a laptop to offer a reporter a peek into what has to be one of the country’s fastest-growing history departments.
Courses start as you’d expect, with the virtual equivalent of around-the-classroom introductions. Students see a picture of Mr. Blodgett mountain-climbing in South Korea, where he was stationed in the military. Some of them are soldiers, too, but the university’s history courses have also enrolled an assistant to the agriculture secretary, a government-laboratory worker in California, a disc jockey, a security guard, a Baltimore firefighter, and an Army contractor who hoped to earn a living at his hobby of making custom Western-saddle replicas.
Self-Guided Learning
In Mr. Blodgett’s 200-level military-history survey, much of what students do is analyze readings from the Web site HistoryNet. For one segment that spans the ancient to Napoleonic periods, for example, Mr. Blodgett allows students to choose articles they want to read rather than requiring a particular text. Students find those texts on Web sites listed in the course-materials section and then share what they learned.
Mr. Blodgett follows up with a question for each student. When one writes about how precise plans propelled Alexander’s success in his 331 BC battle against Darius, Mr. Blodgett responds with the military maxim that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
“Do you think that the inflexibility might have hurt Alexander?” he writes in the discussion board.
Students also have to leave comments on two classmates’ postings. But they aren’t required to read any books. “I didn’t want them to be boxed in,” Mr. Blodgett says.
So how does this compare with a traditional history department?
Start with Mr. Blodgett’s credentials: a bachelor’s in secondary social-studies education, a master’s in military studies, another master’s in strategic intelligence, and a Ph.D. in business administration with a concentration in homeland security. It would be very difficult for someone like him, without a Ph.D. in history or a related subject, to get a job as department chair at a traditional university.
Then there’s HistoryNet, a product of the Weider History Group, which bills itself as the world’s largest publisher of history magazines. The president-elect of the American Historical Association, Anthony Grafton, had not heard of it until asked by this reporter. And letting students choose their readings?
“In a survey course, I would never do that,” says Mr. Grafton, a professor at Princeton University. “The point of a survey is to give students who don’t know much about a field an orientation. ... The way you guarantee that is by assigning readings and testing people on them.”
Also unconventional: the faculty-compensation system, which allowed American Public University to crank out so many degree programs so fast, including lower-enrollment liberal-arts fare like philosophy.
The university pays adjuncts by the number of students they teach rather than per class. In the past, it has required them to teach a class even if only one student enrolls. So a professor might have taught 15 students in four classes, or 15 students in one class—for the institution, the cost was basically the same, says James P. Etter, a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer who served as the university’s chief executive until April 2004.
The flexibility and low fixed costs allowed the university to expand its curriculum. “If we didn’t have a model like that, we’d have probably had five or 10 degrees up,” he says. “When I left, we had over 50.”
The university has more than 70 degree programs today. And growing. In November, it added another degree that involves the liberal arts, a bachelor’s in general studies. Which generally means that, in addition to studying whenever they want, students can now graduate with a degree cobbled together from whatever courses they want, too.
