On his second try, Scott L. Scarborough may be about to realize his grand ambition of radically transforming a struggling state institution in the Rust Belt.
Six years ago, as chief financial officer of the University of Toledo, Mr. Scarborough pressed the idea of rapid growth driven by online teaching. Worried faculty members blocked him. Now, as president of the University of Akron — another Ohio institution under a bit more financial pressure to experiment — that vision is coming together.
Barely a year into his presidency, Mr. Scarborough’s Akron is offering more than a dozen core classes partly online at one-seventh of their usual cost. Next, through a developing partnership with a company that specializes in online education, he hopes to generate income by ballooning a popular undergraduate nursing program from a few dozen students to a few thousand.
It’s all part of a goal to make Akron a comprehensive “polytechnic university” of the future — one that teaches sciences and the arts while using cutting-edge technology to instill in students the skills most valued by industry.
Not everyone is convinced. Akron faculty members fear a loss of academic control and an emphasis on profits over intellectual pursuits. Outside experts see a possible repetition of the overexuberance and excesses now plaguing stand-alone for-profit colleges. Even the hint of a possible name change — Mr. Scarborough has adopted “Ohio’s Polytechnic University” as a new tagline, sparking fears of a deep institutional overhaul — fueled a protest petition that drew more than 10,000 signatures.
The nation’s online revolution is now 20 years old and maturing in many fields, such as retail, travel, banking, and video-gaming. Akron’s dilemma is a reminder that other sectors — education among them — are still working it out. For colleges, much of the uncertainty centers on the fact that 71 percent of the student body nationwide is nontraditional. How can online delivery lower costs, especially for the financially neediest students? And can it help financially strapped institutions expand their market share without sacrificing their identities?
Mr. Scarborough declined to offer his own views, referring questions to other administrators at the university. But he has acknowledged that his approach is not a safe bet: He told a gathering of Cleveland business leaders in May that the continuing transformation is “a calculated risk that makes absolute sense for the University of Akron.”
Numbers and Nerves
Nursing education is widely seen as a prime initial opportunity, and not just at Akron. American hospitals are full of registered nurses with two-year degrees, but studies have shown they become much more effective with four-year B.S. degrees.
The University of Akron’s own online four-year nursing program has seen its enrollment jump from about 60 to 100 just in the past year, said David Gordon, dean of the College of Health Professions.
But through an agreement now being negotiated with a Texas-based company, Academic Partnerships, that number could quickly rise into the thousands, said Dr. Gordon, who is leading the talks aimed at bringing the company into his nursing-education program. Academic Partnerships, which now works with about 30 or 40 colleges nationwide, is simply more efficient at managing such programs, he said: “We think we’re good at it; we don’t think we’re great at it.”
The changes in the program would be deep, including a restructuring of the curriculum to fit into eight-week sessions and the use of outside “academic coaches” who would provide the front-line interaction with students.
When Mr. Scarborough pitched his plan at the University of Toledo, professors found those interventions intrusive and threatening to faculty jobs, said Leigh Chiarelott, a professor of education who is chairman of the department of curriculum and instruction.
But Randy Best, the Dallas entrepreneur who is the founder and chairman of Academic Partnerships, sees such fears as overblown. Mr. Best has a track record of building businesses that aim to disrupt traditional educational models. A fund raiser for President George W. Bush, he collected some $380 million by selling a company that produced reading-education programs designed to fit the requirements of Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program. For a subsequent venture — the American College of Education, which aimed to provide master’s degrees to teachers — Mr. Best purchased the “academic assets” of Barat College, acquiring its accreditation in the process. (The seller was DePaul University, where Mr. Scarborough was then serving as chief financial officer.)
Academic Partnerships, Mr. Best said, does nothing to change the basic curriculum or deliver the instruction. The courses colleges offer in conjunction with Academic Partnerships are just “condensed” versions of those the colleges are already providing, he said. And the academic coaches are little different from teaching assistants, who grade papers and lead discussion threads but don’t actually provide instruction.
“We’re just a delivery mechanism,” Mr. Best said. “The quality is the quality of the institution.”
A $60-Million Shortfall
Either way, Academic Partnerships does play a relatively major role for its clients. Many companies help colleges offer and deliver online classes. Some merely provide equipment or software. Academic Partnerships — by helping colleges find prospective students, rewrite their curricula, and even teach the classes — is among the more comprehensive.
And it appears to do those tasks well, Mr. Chiarelott acknowledged. “It’s a very professional operation,” he said. “It just didn’t fit us and what we wanted to do.”
Dr. Gordon, on the other hand, does see a fit, especially as it concerns student recruitment. Akron hopes to grow within five years from about 25,000 students to 30,000, with most of the additional enrollment coming from online and blended courses, said the vice provost leading the growth effort, Todd A. Rickel.
Academic Partnerships is a large part of that expansion plan. The company plans to work with hospitals and other employers in the Akron area to find nurses who need the additional education. “We are somewhat of a financially strapped institution right now, and that kind of advertising and marketing really is not cheap,” Dr. Gordon said.
Those financial factors are an important reason Toledo faculty members could block Academic Partnerships but their Akron counterparts might not. The similar-size institutions are located in economically stressed cities and face declining enrollments. But while the University of Toledo has managed to keep its books balanced, the University of Akron struggles with high debt, according to recent ratings by Moody’s Investors Service. Just last week, Mr. Scarborough announced plans to tackle a looming $60-million shortfall over the next three years through steps that include laying off 215 employees, cutting the baseball team, and outsourcing dining services.
The budget crisis is a problem of the university’s own making, said John F. Zipp, a professor of sociology and Akron chapter president of the American Association of University Professors. The campus is overbuilt, a result of “tremendously optimistic projections” of future growth, Mr. Zipp said.
The university has seen its faculty-student ratio weaken from 19-to-1 in 1999 to 23-to-1 today, Mr. Zipp said. Rather than seek profits from online volume, Mr. Zipp said, Akron should consider emphasizing its traditional strengths and comparative advantages in areas that could be attractive to adult students and veterans.
But for now, the grumbling has largely been behind the scenes, with the petition over the feared name change representing the main challenge to Mr. Scarborough.
Progress in Texas?
Beyond Akron, Academic Partnerships clients have included Arizona State University, Ohio University, Purdue University, and several state institutions in Texas.
One of those institutions, the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, serves vast distances in West Texas and has had online offerings dating back almost to the advent of Internet browsers, in the mid-1990s. Permian Basin now has a mix of its own online courses and those developed with Academic Partnerships. Enrollment at Permian Basin reached 5,500 students last year, an increase of 38 percent over two years, driven mostly by online registrations. Academic Partnerships was responsible for about half of that increase, said the university’s president, W. David Watts.
Direct measures of effectiveness are difficult to come by, but on one key statewide measure — placing students in jobs or graduate and professional schools — Permian Basin last year was ranked third among Texas’ 40 state universities.
Personal interactions between teachers and students in a traditional setting are invaluable, Mr. Watts said. On the other hand, he said, there’s great value in being able to talk with a student online at 2 a.m., in having schedules that fit personal needs, and in making the whole experience affordable for most students.
“There’s something really quite elitist about saying that only people who have the time and money to spend time in my classroom are deserving of a university education,” Mr. Watts said.
Permian Basin’s online offerings — including classes organized by Academic Partnerships — were the right fit for Carrie Bronaugh, a mother of four working as a program director at a local counseling center for alcohol and drug abuse. More than a decade after earning an associate degree at a nearby community college, she came to Permian Basin for a bachelor’s degree in psychology so she could start her own youth-assistance agency.
She earned the degree by taking about 20 courses over two years, almost all of them online, at hours that fit her family and at a price that left her without any student debt. By contrast, she said, a classmate in one of her few in-person courses felt stressed by the hour-plus drive to the campus. “You could tell at times she was a bit flustered with having to get there on time,” Ms. Bronaugh said.
‘The Murky Middle’
Wall Street investors seem increasingly attracted to companies such as Academic Partnerships, 2U, and Embanet, which can make money in the world of higher education without needing to form and run their own schools, gain their own accreditation, or meet standards required of institutions that award Title IV federal student aid.
“It seems to have the best of both worlds” for the investors, said Trace Urdan, a longtime education-industry analyst. “You’re taking advantage of the change in higher education and the opportunity for innovation that private enterprise brings,” he said, “but you’re dodging all of the onerous Title IV regulations — or at least seeming to.”
That seems like a recipe for more abuse, said Richard A. Allington, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Mr. Best is selling his products “to a bunch of really gullible university administrators” who believe they can get drastically increased enrollments and revenues at no cost, Mr. Allington said.
Mr. Urdan sees more nuance. Highly regarded universities such as Georgetown and Yale have hired 2U to develop and distribute their online offerings, he said, but strive to avoid any dilution of their brand, rejecting applicants at rates as high as or higher than their traditional operations. Places such as the University of Akron fall more in “the murky middle,” clearly hunting students with an eye toward bolstering revenues, he said.
What’s less clear is how well the online approach serves students. Mr. Rickel, the Akron vice provost, conceded there is little evidence of its educational effectiveness. But that will change, he promised, as the university plans to use its social-science faculty to evaluate the success of its online offerings.
In the meantime, more colleges in the murky middle will find themselves debating online partnerships like Akron’s. Derek C. Catsam, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, said he recognizes how much online education has helped his institution and its students. But he warns universities elsewhere to step carefully if they think it might be a simple solution to their financial woes.
“When you saddle up a tiger,” said Mr. Catsam, a former Faculty Senate president, “don’t be surprised if you don’t really have the reins over it.”
Correction (7/17/2015, 1:20 p.m.): This article originally misstated the University of Akron’s new tagline. It is “Ohio’s Polytechnic University,” not “Ohio’s Polytechnic Institute.” The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
