Carving your slice of the 'virtual' education pie: thinking about going virtual? Better bone up on the for-profits to see what you're up against - Online Education

University Business, July, 2003 by Rebecca Sausner

The company, like most of its for-profit peers, focuses its efforts in a handful of narrow vertical segments offering certificates, degrees, and advanced degrees within these areas. At Walden, the sweet spots are management, education, psychology, and hearth and human services, with a nursing program to be added later this year. NTU (accredited by the HLC) allows its students to assemble an engineering curriculum from courses offered at schools such as MIT and Vanderbilt, but they receive an NTU degree when they graduate. Canter, which is not accredited, offers advanced teaching degrees via the teachers colleges it partners with. Both Canter and NTU have tuition-sharing agreements with partner schools and, in many cases, are those schools' only distance-teaming ventures.

As Sylvan works to reorganize itself around the dear to shed its K-12 operations--which will also force it to change its corporate name within the next year--it, like Jones, is turning its attention toward younger students. Earlier this year, Walden announced a bachelor degree completion program in business management and information systems. The school is also working to form partnerships with community colleges nationwide, hoping to become the next education destination for those schools' graduates with associates degrees, says Steve Drake, Sylvan's VP of Communications.

KAPLAN INC. (www.Kaplan.com) has grown from a $75 million test-prep company in 1994 to a $621 million educational behemoth, with more than 40 percent of its revenue coming from its higher education division. Kaplan's virtual university component falls under its Kaplan College division, which has a token 500 students on its campus in Davenport, Iowa, but has more than 9,000 students enrolled in online degree and certificate programs. (Unlike Phoenix, which was launched as a campus school and migrated online--it now has 85,000 on-campus students--the Kaplan College ownership of a tiny campus is Kaplan's means of "authority" to grant postsecondary degrees.) Under this umbrella, in 1998 Kaplan launched the country's first online law school, Concord Law School (www.concordlawschool.com), which exists outside the American Bar Association jurisdiction because the ABA has elected not to accredit online law programs. The lack of accreditation means that after their first year of school, students must pass what's known as the "baby bar." When they graduate from law school, they are eligible to take the California bar exam. They can then be licensed in other states based on reciprocity agreements.

"We're taking the long-term view--not of if [the ABA will accredit online programs], but when," says Robert Greenberg, general manager of Kaplan Higher Education Online (www.kaplanhighereducation.com), noting the enormous number of advanced business and medical degrees that are now available via distance education. Concord's first class graduated in December 2002 and received the results of the California bar exam over Memorial Day weekend.