Five years ago, Arizona State University (ASU), like many other giant public universities, was lagging in the field of online education, with just 1,200 students enrolled in its degree programs. Today, that enrollment has swelled to 10,000, and by next year, when an influx of Starbucks baristas enroll in online programs through a highly publicized partnership announced last month, it is expected to have more than twice as many online students. But for ASU, 25,000 students is hardly enough. The school has set its sights on growing online enrollment to at least 100,000 students in the next five years — more than tripling a 2011 goal of 30,000 students by 2020.
“If the University of Phoenix can have 400,000 students, most of them online, why can’t a real university like Arizona State grow to a similar size?” Phil Regier, the dean of ASU’s online programs, asked rhetorically in an interview with BuzzFeed.
The goal, Regier said, is to make ASU into an online giant, but one that doesn’t fall into the familiar traps of the University of Phoenix and other for-profit universities. For-profits like Phoenix were the original pioneers in online education but have struggled in recent years with low completion, high student loan default rates, and allegations of poor quality and misleading marketing practices.
Michael Crow, ASU’s dynamic president of 12 years, has trumpeted the expansion of ASU Online as a mission of increased access and educational innovation. But some critics say that its rapid growth is something else: a pursuit of profit that has already taken the university too far in the direction of corporatization, leading it to operate more as a business concerned with generating revenue than as a public university. The deal with Starbucks, they say, is a prime example of a blurring line between for-profit companies and public universities’ online programs.