They inspected our academic accounting system, which was a detailed quality control about everything we asked of every student at the end of every class about instruction, curriculum, were the lights too dim? We were accountable. They had all their education staff come in and vet everything. Murphy: All the companies we worked with here in Phoenix, such as Honeywell and Motorola, had been going to the state university system in Arizona for years trying to get them to provide education that that would allow their working adult employees to stay in the company and move up the scale, whether they needed a bachelor’s degree or a master’s to move up the ladder. If you make a mistake in the open market, you impose discipline on yourself.ĭN: You also have noted that the companies you worked with respected your business mindset, right? John Sperling mortgaged his house, had some retirement from being a professor,and his girlfriend put in some money, and that was it. We couldn’t go to the legislature for money. Being for-profit imposed fiscal discipline. Our business management skills were negligible. Murphy: First of all, we all came from the nonprofit and public sector. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.ĭN: You say at one point in your book that if UOPX were not-for-profit it would not have survived. Murphy told his side of the University of Phoenix in a 2013 book, “Mission Forsaken.” He recently sat down the Deseret News at a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center of Organizational Research and Design. At that point, the company began responding to Wall Street, Murphy says, chasing stock prices and lowering its admissions standards, while jettisoning the academic model that had made it work. The key moment - which Murphy calls the “betrayal” of the University of Phoenix mission - came shortly after he left the company and the company went public.
Enrollment peaked in 2010 at 600,000 students, but by 2015 had fallen to 227,000 as the for-profit industry came under intense public scrutiny. He was also closely involved in honing the school’s academic philosophy, which he says was grounded on teaching working adults in the their 20s and 30s, most of whom had tuition all or partly paid by employers.īy 2011, the Apollo Group, the holding company that owns the University of Phoenix, was valued at $5.36 billion. Murphy worked intensely to overcome political and academic hurdles during the UOPX’s rise to prominence. Murphy argues that the company lost its direction when it abandoned its roots, which were serving working adults, not recent high school graduates. John Murphy, a co-founder of the University of Phoenix, isn't surprised by any of this news.
Proposed new rules by the Obama administration would further squeeze the industry based on these key data points. This comes at a time when the industry as a whole is facing severe scrutiny for high default rates, high student debt, sketchy recruitment practices and dubious outcomes. The University of Phoenix, the publicly traded grand-daddy of for-profit colleges, made headlines a few weeks ago with the revelation that the company's enrollment had dropped 50 percent over the past five years.
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