Gainful Education: The Demise of the Triad?

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Cited in

Author	John D. Murphy
DOI	http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12574
Published date	01 September 2016
Date	01 September 2016

756 Public Administration Review • September | October 2016

Public Administration Review,

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12574.

John D. Murphy was founder of the

University of Phoenix and served as Senior

Vice President for Institutional Affairs and

Academic Vice President. He was a member

of the board and executive committee of

its publicly traded holding company, Apollo

Group, Inc. His book,

Mission Forsaken:

The University of Phoenix Affair with Wall

Street

(Proving Ground Education, 2013),

is a comprehensive historical account of

his experiences and what resulted from the

abandonment of its founding mission.

E-mail: jjdml@me.com

Perspective

H igher education faces serious threats to its

transformative role in American and global

life. Its champions must transcend our

differences and close ranks in its defense.

Consider a few recent data points. According to

Bloomberg Businessweek , between 1978 and 2012, tuition

and fees at traditional colleges and universities increased

1120 percent. The Economist has estimated that this

figure is some five times the rate of inflation.

During the same time period, health care increased

600 percent, housing 300 percent, consumer price

index (CPI) 200 percent, and food 200 percent.

Student loan debt advanced to $1.2 trillion and was

still climbing by the end of 2015, triple the amount

from the previous decade .

The Financial Times reported that average student

loan debt per borrower advanced to $29,000 in 2014

from $18,550 in 2004.

Only 57 percent of those enrolled at public

sector colleges and universities graduate after six

years. For low-income students, it is 45 percent;

African American, 39 percent; and 27 percent for

nontraditional students over 25 years of age.

The roots of these outcomes are complex, but we can

be confident that the structural and programmatic

inadequacies in an outdated regulatory and quality

assurance triad play an elemental role. Members of

the triad—federal government, states, and private

accrediting associations—tasked with regulating

the quality of postsecondary education emerged

and aligned themselves independently in the early

twentieth century, when postsecondary education

was circumscribed by physical location, religiously

observed the 1906 Carnegie Unit (requiring 120 hours

of class time for a year of academic credit), almost

exclusively enrolled 18–24 year olds, and operated on a

late-nineteenth-century agrarian calendar.

In the 1990s, the emergence of the for-profit higher

education sector, including a spate of publicly traded

institutions, along with the development of online

education, cast the congenital weaknesses of the triad

into sharp relief.

For-profit higher education institutions are businesses,

so they move quickly to seize opportunities, unlike

traditional higher education institutions often

pinioned by labyrinthine and glacial academic

decision-making processes.

Spurred (and maybe embarrassed) by innovative

extended campus and online delivery systems

pioneered by the for-profit, publicly traded higher

education sector, many traditional higher education

institutions developed a multitude of physical

operations and now offer education online. The triad ’ s

picturesque early twentieth century methodology

for regulating, monitoring, and improving academic

quality and performance in this new postsecondary

world is woefully outdated, and when reforms are

attempted, often politically out-gunned.

Each leg of the triad was designed to honor the pace

traditional colleges and universities. Applied to the

quicker digital age operations of higher education

institutions in a global economy, triad regulators—

plus politicians and interest groups—now wade

through the statutory and political outback with a

bureaucratic witching stick trying to divine what

to do.

Traditional public higher education institutions

predicted the replacement of traditional-aged

students (18–24) by nontraditional students (over

25 and working). Nevertheless, since 1990 that

sector engaged in an unprecedented construction

boom, spending hundreds of billions of tax, donor,

borrowed, and student loan dollars to create world