Des Moines Register
07-31-07
Kaplan, Iowa's third-largest college
clicks with older learners
At mostly online Kaplan, average age is 34; most juggle work, family
By JANE NORMAN
REGISTER WASHINGTON BUREAU
Cathy Kramer of Muscatine loved her job in marketing, but at 51 she still
dreamed of becoming a classroom teacher.
"I was gone a lot, and travel was getting a little old," she recalled. "My kids were
13 and 11, and I was missing them growing up. And I always wanted to teach."
To get her master's degree in education, she enrolled at the third-largest
university in Iowa based on full- and part-time enrollment - and it wasn't the
University of Northern Iowa. Now, Kramer is a science instructor at Muscatine
High School - and she did most of her class work sitting in front of her home
computer in her bunny slippers.
Kramer was a member of the first Iowa group of career-changing teacher
graduates of Kaplan University, a rapidly growing, for-profit institution where most
classes are taught online.
Its national headquarters are in a Davenport strip mall, with additional offices and
support staff scattered from Chicago to Florida. At Kaplan, there's no football
team or dorms or frat parties, but Kaplan is emerging as one of Iowa's largest
institutions of higher learning.
Kaplan, a Washington Post Co. property planted in the prairie, has quietly
mushroomed from an enrollment of about 1,500 five years ago to more than
23,000 students today from across the country. The school's enrollment has
soared as online schools have struggled to gain credibility in the world of higher
education.
Kaplan and similar online institutions don't usually attract the typical 18-year-old
high school graduate. Education experts say they are tapping into a market of
adult students itching to change their lives and improve their salaries, and willing
to pay a minimum of $320 per credit hour to do it.
"They value the flexibility," said David Clinefelter, provost of Kaplan University.
The average age is 34, and most students hold down full-time jobs and have
families at the same time, he said.
University's growth tied to online surge
Most of Kaplan's students are not Iowans, despite the college's roots tracing
back to the founding of a business school in Davenport 70 years ago. Students
are recruited by advertisements on the Internet or television.
"There was no Kaplan University 10 years ago. It really has been created out of
nothing," said Richard Garrett, an analyst of online higher education at
Eduventures, a Boston education research firm.
Nearly 3.2 million students took at least one online course in fall 2005, up from
2.3 million the previous year, according to a 2006 report by the Babson Survey
Research Group. More than 80 percent were undergraduates.
Traditional brick-and-mortar universities have some online offerings, but for the
most part they struggle to serve adult students well, said David Breneman, dean
of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.
"It really takes a different mind-set to deal with adult students," said Breneman,
who has studied online higher education. "We still expect them to come to us on
our terms."
The program that Kramer attended was Iowa's first online teacher training
program, Kaplan officials say, although it was accompanied by in-classroom
observation and teaching.
Approved by the Iowa State Board of Education earlier this year, with the intent
of dealing with teacher shortages, students are granted an online master of
education degree or an Iowa teacher intern certificate.
Kaplan officials say they also have launched Iowa's first online nursing education
program with their bachelor of science in nursing, which has been approved by
the Iowa Board of Nursing.
Kaplan: 75 programs, but others are larger
Kaplan University began when Kaplan Co. in 2000 acquired the Quest
Educational Corp., which in 1998 had acquired the Davenport campus of the
American Institute of Commerce, a two-year business school founded in 1937.
Its seven-member board of trustees includes four Iowans, said Ronald
Blumenthal, senior vice president of administration.
There is a 35,000-square-foot headquarters in Davenport, with classrooms where
some students take classes and attend labs in person for programs such as
health sciences, business and criminal justice.
Some 75 programs are available online for students seeking bachelor's and
master's degrees. A bachelor's requires 180 hours, which at $320 a credit hour
would total $57,600, which Kaplan officials say is a mid-range cost among forprofit colleges. The university is a key profit center for the Washington Post Co.
Revenue at the Kaplan education division, which also includes well-known test
preparation services and other enterprises, rose 16 percent during the first
quarter of this year compared with a year ago.
Kaplan's students received $145 million in federal direct student loans and Pell
grants in 2005, nearly as much in similar loans and grants as those enrolled at
Iowa State University, according to figures compiled by a project that examines
federal spending. Kaplan officials say the figure topped $200 million in 2006.
More than 80 percent of Kaplan students qualify for Pell grants, which carry a
maximum award of $4,310, do not have to be repaid and are aimed at lowincome students.
Kaplan is hardly alone in the field of for-profit, online higher education, although
Garrett said it is among the five largest. It competes with behemoths such as the
University of Phoenix, the nation's largest online university, which enrolls about
200,000 students.
Phoenix, however, has had some troubles. It is the target of a lawsuit in which
two former admissions recruiters allege that the university improperly obtained
federal aid money by paying recruiters on the basis of how many students they
enrolled, according to the New York Times. Phoenix also has had to pay a $9.8
million fine levied by the Department of Education, although it's admitting no
wrongdoing.
Kaplan attracts a few complaints on Web forums devoted to consumer problems,
but it also has defenders.
The Better Business Bureau reports that Kaplan has a satisfactory record.
A spokesman for the Iowa attorney general's office said no unusual pattern of
consumer problems has been observed with Kaplan.
Kaplan's retention is hard to measure
Kaplan officials stress their programs' quality, the responsiveness of professors many of them moonlighting professionals - and the attention paid to curriculum.
The university is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and
Schools, as are larger colleges such as Iowa State University. Curriculum
content is standardized, which makes it easier to measure outcomes, said
Clinefelter, who moved to Kaplan after serving as president of Graceland
University in Lamoni.
For a full-time Iowa student, a Kaplan education is more costly than a public
institution's. According to the not-for-profit College Board, annual tuition and fees
at Kaplan for a full-time student in the fall of 2007 will be $13,680, compared with
$6,161 at ISU or $3,060 at Des Moines Area Community College.
However, most Kaplan students are not full time and generally take two classes
in a 10-week term, said Clinefelter. Forty percent are working toward a two-year
associate's degree, 55 percent toward a bachelor's degree and 5 percent on a
graduate degree.
Retention, a key measure for a university, is hard to gauge because it is usually
based on traditional college freshmen. The College Board says that 42 percent of
Kaplan's freshmen return for their sophomore year, compared with 83 percent at
ISU.
The National Center for Education Statistics says 62 percent of Kaplan's full-time
students and 31 percent of part-time students returned in 2004-05.
"We don't have good data" yet, Clinefelter said, on what percentage ultimately
wind up with degrees, because Kaplan has been in existence a relatively short
time. The federal government measures degree completion in six-year
increments.
There's also the question of perception by other educational institutions. While
Clinefelter said he has not heard of problems associated with Kaplan students
attempting to transfer, Breneman predicted that many traditional universities will
continue to fight acceptance of credits from Kaplan or other online schools.
"You'd find very few people in traditional higher education who would say they
were doing something that was as good as what we think we're doing," he said.
Breneman said that he said he personally is positive toward online education, but
that he was taken aback when a student recently asked to transfer credits from
the University of Phoenix to the University of Virginia.
"My gut reaction was no way," said Breneman. "I had to step back and ask
myself, what do I really think?"
Kramer, the science teacher, earned her bachelor's degree out of high school at
Purdue University, and a master's degree at night from St. Ambrose University
before enrolling at Kaplan. She said she anticipated a remote experience
learning online, but found her professors were welcoming and accessible.
"I'm very close with the people I 'went to school' with, and I didn't think I would be
at all," she said. "We're all kind of churning through our first year of teaching
together, and we all kind of helped each other through that."
It has worked out for her life, as well.
"I am so happy. Teaching is a hoot," Kramer said. "Teaching teenagers is so
much fun. And I get more time with my kids."
Online offers a good fit for some
Some Kaplan students have tried traditional colleges. Michelle McCoy, 26,
attended Iowa State University in Ames for a while, but didn't care for it much,
blanching at a 600-student lecture hall.
She earned a bachelor's degree from Hamilton College in Des Moines, a
traditional for-profit college that is part of Kaplan.
As a single working mom, she then opted to work on her master's degree in
business at night - totally online and from Kaplan.
"It's different," she said. "You definitely have to be a self-starter. ... It was very
difficult at first. I felt overwhelmed."
Now, though, she said she's learning more than she did in a classroom, in part
because an online student can't hide in the back row.
"You have to read, and you have to study," McCoy said.
Professors communicate one-on-one with students via e-mail, but there are also
live weekly seminars with the entire class in a chat room atmosphere.
Assignments, tests and research papers fly back and forth through cyberspace.
Students log in to discussion forums to hold conversations on specific topics, get
graded on their contributions and analyze their peers' comments.
"We've had people become really good friends after taking a number of classes
together in the same program," although they may never meet in person, said
Kaplan University Provost David Clinefelter.
University enrollment
Iowans might not be too familiar with the mostly online Kaplan University, but the
number of full- and part-time students taking courses through the Davenportbased school makes it the third-largest university in Iowa.
Here’s how Kaplan compares with Iowa’s traditional schools, based on total
enrollment for fall 2006:
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
FOUR-YEAR, FULL- AND PART-TIME: 29,979
PART-TIME ONLY: 6,854
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
FOUR-YEAR, FULL- AND PART-TIME: 25,462
PART-TIME ONLY: 3,279
Reporter Jane Norman can be reached at (202) 906-8137 or
jnorman@dmreg.com