By Jeffrey Selingo

Sunday, June 22, 2003; Page W27

Just before 6 on a Monday evening, Al Roberson steers his black Chevy Cavalier into a parking space outside the University of Phoenix and hurries into a low-rise office building at Columbia Corporate Park. He has only a few minutes before class begins.

It's the kind of warm spring day that lures many college students to a leafy quad for a game of Frisbee. But not here. For one thing, there is no quad, just a man-made lake bordered on one side by two car dealerships and on the other by sleek offices. For another, students like Roberson, a 32-year-old systems engineer for Sun Microsystems, don't have time for Frisbee. Most have just battled rush-hour traffic on Interstate 95, coming straight from work in their wingtips or high heels.

On the ground floor of the office building that houses the Phoenix campus, Roberson quickly checks a video monitor on the wall to see where his human resource management class is meeting tonight. As he heads down the hallway to Room 6, students around him finish up cell phone calls and duck into the vending-machine room -- the closest thing to a student union here -- to grab something to eat.

Roberson, who is trying to complete a business degree that he started more than a decade ago at the University of Michigan, says the whole place reminds him "more of a corporate retreat than a college campus."

That's by design. In fact, Phoenix has jettisoned many of the trappings and traditions of higher education. It doesn't have a library, it doesn't offer tenure to its faculty members, it has no sports teams, it doesn't enroll students under 23 without special permission, and its three-credit classes are only several weeks long, compared with typical academic semesters, which can last three months or more.

Perhaps the biggest difference, though, between this college and more traditional rivals is that the University of Phoenix makes money, and lots of it, some $153 million last year. And that focus on the bottom line has made Phoenix, and others in the fast-growing for-profit sector, the bane of traditional academics.

Started with just a handful of students in 1976, the University of Phoenix has grown from its Arizona roots to become the largest private higher-education institution in the country, with 124 locations in 26 states, and some 152,000 students. The Columbia campus, Phoenix's first on the East Coast, opened in 1999. Two other Maryland locations, in Rockville and Timonium, soon followed. Phoenix moved into Virginia last year, opening a campus in Reston.

While Phoenix is the largest for-profit university in the country, it certainly isn't alone. There are roughly 750 degree-granting for-profits nationwide, enrolling more than 427,000 undergraduate and graduate students. In 2001, the industry generated some $5.3 billion in revenue, a 20 percent jump from the year before. The image of for-profit schools as correspondence courses promoted by Sally Struthers on late-night television has been replaced by students who drive to class in BMWs and carry briefcases. While the for-profit providers vary in their approaches, they all aim to make a dollar catering to students that traditional, nonprofit universities have largely ignored: working adults.

The Washington region has proved to be particularly fertile ground for profit-driven higher education. It has a high percentage of immigrants and minority students, in particular, without a bachelor's degree, as well as college-educated professionals seeking to get ahead with a master's degree, especially in business and information technology. Plus, the area is rich with employers willing to pick up the tab for tuition.

"Most of the universities in this market are traditional institutions," says Robert S. Silberman, chairman and chief executive officer of Strayer Education Inc., which is based in Arlington. It has 16,700 students on 23 campuses, with six of them in the D.C. metropolitan area. Traditional universities, Silberman adds, are "trying to serve adults, but that's not their primary mission. Their mission is the 18-year-old high school graduate, and adult students are a much different breed."

Places like Strayer, Phoenix and DeVry University, a for-profit with a campus in Crystal City, have designed their programs to exploit those differences. That's especially true of Phoenix, where the day begins just when most adults are getting out of work. Classes meet only once a week for four hours, and last just five weeks for undergraduate courses, and six weeks for graduate courses.

Students take classes only one at a time rather than several at once, and can start their courses at virtually any point in the year, not just in the fall, spring or summer. Students also have the choice to take some or all of their classes through Phoenix's online division. And tuition is comparable to what private area colleges charge their part-time students: $960 for undergraduate classes and $1,320 for graduate courses.

When students are asked why they chose Phoenix, they sound as if they belong in one of the commercials that fill the radio airwaves when the university moves into a new market. "You can't beat the schedule," says Vincent Reed, a 36-year-old manager for Verizon Wireless, who is working toward his bachelor's degree in business administration.

Reed, who lives in Severn, considered the University of Maryland University College and Strayer. He didn't really care where he got his degree, he says. The credential is all that matters to him. Most of his colleagues in management at Verizon have at least a bachelor's degree, he explains, and "if I have any hope of getting ahead, I need one, too." He picked Phoenix not for its reputation, but for its fast-paced program. "I cover 21/2 classes here in the same time period as one class elsewhere," he says, "and I only have to make this commute once a week."

Phoenix's super-compressed schedule, which is unlike any other in higher education, is probably the university's biggest selling point with time-pressed adults. It's also what draws much of the criticism from traditional academics. Phoenix is able to offer fewer classroom hours than other colleges and still meet accreditation standards -- which is important, since that makes its students eligible for government grants and loans -- because the university includes time spent in something it calls "learning teams." The teams are made up of small groups of students in each class who meet once a week on their own for four to five hours by conference call, e-mail or face-to-face to complete assigned projects.

While Phoenix compares the learning teams to a lab session of a lecture class at a traditional university, professors and administrators elsewhere question what really happens in the unsupervised sessions, especially since the students don't have to meet in person.

"You can imagine the potential for people not taking them very seriously," says David W. Breneman, dean of the University of Virginia's education school, who was on a team of educators that, at the request of the New York Board of Regents, reviewed Phoenix's application to operate in that state. The university has struggled and so far failed to win approval from the regents to operate in New York.

Students have mixed opinions about the learning teams. It seems nearly everyone has a horror story about a group where some members failed to pull their weight on a project. "You can get into a team where everyone does the work collectively, or you can get into one where most of the work falls on one individual," says Anita Miller, a 43-year-old unemployed single mother from Eldersburg, Md., who is studying for her bachelor's degree in business administration at the Columbia campus.

Roberson, whose employer is reimbursing him for up to $10,000 a year for his classes, is even more skeptical about the way the system works: "The advanced people in the learning teams pull everyone else along."

Even though half the course is completed in the learning teams, the weekly class is still a race against the clock for faculty members, who must cover a range of preset objectives from a standardized, centrally developed curriculum. Classes start at precisely 6 p.m., although many students stream in late. (Phoenix allows only two absences from classroom sessions before students are forced to withdraw, and most faculty members say they're strict about attendance.) Students plunk down a folded notecard in front of them with their name on it, pull out a bag of chips or a sandwich and settle in for a marathon night.

Tonight, it's the first meeting for Roberson and his eight classmates in human resource management. It's a small group, as are most Phoenix classes, which number 14 students on average. After quick introductions, the instructor, Clair Caputo, a leasing manager for GMAC Financial Services, kicks off a discussion by asking how technology helps managers these days. Students toss out answers -- intranets, telecommuting, teleconferencing -- and Caputo writes the list on a whiteboard.

There's no lecturing here. The students know too much for that. Almost everyone prefaces his or her answers in class with, "At my company," or, "At my previous employer." When one student asks for an explanation of "pay-banding," the particulars are provided not by Caputo but by a student who works at the Department of Defense, which uses such a system to establish pay ranges for positions.

After an hour, the discussion moves to telecommuting, which Roberson could teach himself. He works out of his Silver Spring home and has telecommuted for years. No one offers anything on the subject he doesn't already know, and Roberson has trouble staying focused. ("It was a battle against boredom," he says later.)

The conversation veers into job-sharing as the clock slowly inches toward 10 p.m. For the most part, the students remain engaged, refreshed by breaks provided by the instructor. Reed, the Verizon Wireless manager, acknowledges that Phoenix's four-hour classes are exhausting, but his need for his degree keeps him coming back week after week. He likes being in class with people in the same boat.

"There's no fooling around here," Reed says. "You're working with adults your own age and feed off their history. If I had gone to a community college, I'd be there with teenagers."

The maturity of the students is what attracts many instructors to teach here. "Students are so engaged in their learning," says Phoenix teacher Tyra Lundy, who writes and designs training programs for corporations and the military, and has also taught at Anne Arundel Community College and American University. "At a community college, I felt like I was feeding them information, and they were taking notes to pass an exam. Students have a reason for being here. It's not like they left high school and Mom and Dad said go to college. They've made a conscious decision to return to school to earn a degree."

All but a handful of Phoenix faculty are part-timers. The university actually calls them "practitioners" since most of them work full time in the fields they teach. Phoenix takes care of the prep work by providing them with a centralized curriculum that is developed by a small cadre of full-time faculty as well as some part-time instructors. The lighter workload for faculty is reflected in pay: Phoenix instructors in the Washington area earn between $800 and $1,650 per course, compared with $2,000 to $5,000 for adjuncts at more traditional universities in the area.

Employing an army of part-time faculty members, of course, helps boost Phoenix's profit margin. But the practice often raises red flags with regulators when the university looks to open new locations. Many states require colleges to have a minimum number of full-time professors. Phoenix's lack of a campus library -- another cost-saving measure -- also causes problems with regulators. Instead of a library, Phoenix gives students access to an electronic database of more than 11,000 journals. The Maryland Higher Education Commission agreed to grant waivers to Phoenix on both the full-time faculty and library rules, over the objection of the state's association of private colleges, which questioned the fairness of two sets of standards.

"Our position was that this is a very different model that didn't work within the traditional rules," says John A. Sabatini, assistant secretary for planning and academic affairs at the Maryland commission, who favored granting the exceptions.

The initial consternation over Phoenix has since died down in Maryland. Traditional colleges tend to "exaggerate the impact of Phoenix," says Breneman, the University of Virginia dean who is co-editing a book on for-profit universities. "They set for-profits up as the bogeyman. For-profits are not stealing market share, they are essentially extending it."

Local university officials say they realize now that Phoenix poses less of a threat than they first believed. They say that their enrollments of adult students remain steady, or in some cases are growing.

"We're not tripping over each other," says Janet Niblock, executive director for continuing and professional education at George Mason University. "There is so much need for education and training in Northern Virginia alone that no one institution will ever be able to meet that need." (Only a third of the adult population of Maryland, Virginia and the District has at least a bachelor's degree.)

Indeed, many area colleges are expanding their presence right in the back yards of Phoenix and Strayer. Just off Interstate 270 in Rockville, Johns Hopkins University and a consortium of Maryland's public colleges, including the University of Maryland, operate campuses all within a few miles of Phoenix and Strayer. Johns Hopkins just broke ground for the third building on its Rockville campus off Shady Grove Road, where 8,300 students are already enrolled. Hopkins officials say enrollment grows by some 400 new students every year.

After running out of room for its 2,500 students at a nearby location, Loyola College recently moved its Columbia campus to the same office complex where Phoenix operates. "We share a lake with Phoenix," jokes Scott Greatorex, director of graduate admissions at Loyola, which nearly doubled its space by moving. But he quickly notes that, unlike Phoenix's campus, Loyola has faculty offices and a bookstore at the Columbia location. "We have a university campus."

For the most part, local university officials view Phoenix, Strayer, DeVry and other for-profits as less-selective institutions that attract a lower-caliber student.

"Our students are different" than those who attend Phoenix or Strayer, says Elaine Amir, director of Hopkins's Montgomery County campus. "People come to Hopkins because they like the students who come to Hopkins. They come for the Hopkins name."

Schools like Hopkins and Maryland tend to be more selective about whom they let in, even on a part-time basis. By contrast, most for-profits have open admissions, which essentially means they accept anyone with a high school diploma or the equivalent. Many also give academic credit for what they call "life experiences," such as military service or work, allowing students to get their degree more quickly by skipping basic general-education courses.

For-profits have been particularly successful at attracting minority students. Three of four undergraduates at Strayer's Washington-area campuses are minority students, as are more than half of its graduate students. Phoenix declines to release enrollment statistics for individual campuses or states, but nationwide, 18 percent of its students are African American and 11 percent are Hispanic. Both Strayer and Phoenix say that they do not target minority applicants.

"My theory is that we have put together a set of conveniences for these students that work for them," says Strayer's Silberman. "We have convenient class times, campuses within 10 to 15 minutes of where they live or work and good online capabilities."

Despite the successes of the for-profit industry and the constant complaints about the rapidly rising cost of a college education, few traditional institutions are jumping to copy the bare-bones mentality of places like Phoenix or Strayer. Most say they have no interest in turning their institutions into a business, and even if they did, it would take years to roll back all the things that affect the bottom line: student activities, eclectic course offerings and tenure.

"We have an obligation to meet the learning needs of the state," says Gerald A. Heeger, president of the University of Maryland University College, the arm of the university system that caters to working adults. "Not every need is a profitable need. For-profits simply cherry-pick those fields that are profitable."

In the end, there may be room for both kinds of institutions. For some students, particularly those just out of high school, dormitories, athletics and philosophy class on the quad on a spring afternoon are a quintessential part of college life. For students like Roberson, they aren't nearly as important as getting a degree as quickly as possible.

Tonight, after class finally ends, a weary Roberson packs up his belongings for the drive home, where he plans to get started on the five chapters of reading that need to be completed by next week. He wants to finish his degree by August 2004, although he expects to get sidetracked by business travel. He might have to take some of his remaining classes through Phoenix's online division. One way or another, he vows, he's going to get that piece of paper.

At Sun Microsystems, he says, he has been passed over for several promotions, sometimes by people he has trained. "The excuse was always that they had a bachelor's degree, and I didn't," Roberson says. "I want to once and for all eliminate that excuse."

Jeffrey Selingo is a senior editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education.