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Message: [QUOTE="Bone Dog, post: 5123316, member: 12088"] Thanks for the greater detail. And sorry for derailing the thread. If I understand you correctly, ASU is 'owned' in some sense by Michael Crowe. Is that right? If so, it is puzzling indeed that it counts as a non-profit. The primary question for me about for-profits is whether they have an actual faculty of their own. In other words, is the campus a living intellectual and scholarly community. It is worrisome that much of GCU's academic programs are provided by external 'vendors.' This is what HLC focused on in their original determination that GCU was still for-profit. A related question concerns the value-added side for students. They take out loans, subsidized in one way or another, and it is an important question whether they get what they pay for. In the case of a for-profit that offers mainly training in trades and professions, I'd want to know if their students graduate at a good rate and if their graduates are successful in getting jobs that match their training. Federal rules require schools to track this information and accreditors focus on it. I was on the accreditation committee for my college for a number of years and saw this up close. An added fillip is drawing in veterans, since they can have access to even more student loan subsidies than ordinary students. For-profits tend to recruit from this group quite heavily, more than non-profit schools, and GCU was no different. The Dept of Veterans Affairs pays close attention to this on the value added side of the equation. If the loans they are subsidizing do not yield degrees or jobs at a good enough rate, they naturally become concerned. My impression of GCU is that they do a pretty good job on the value added side, though their Nursing School (which is a major component for them) was cited recently for having a low graduation rate, below 80%. I'm not opposed to for-profits as long as they offer good value for students. It sounds like GCU offers a better value than ASU, and I wonder what shenanigans went into getting the state to charter them in the first place. Back to the first point, about developers and universities, I'd want to compare ASU to a school like UC Irvine, which was initially funded by Donald Bren and used to make his development of the town of Irvine (which he largely owned at the time) much more attractive and profitable. [B]But[/B] UC Irvine is an R1 institution and a major research institution in both the humanities and the sciences. It houses a major medical school, as well as a law school and a business school. I'd say AU and NAU really are comparable institutions, both R1 schools with the sort of faculty and student support that goes along with that. GCU is not an R1 institution, and may not even qualify as R2, nor should it have to in order to provide good value to students. But ASU really ought to be at least R2, and if it isn't that seems like a scandal in the making. [/QUOTE]

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