FPCUs: New Players, Different Game, Unequal Playing Field

Title 22 § 31.24 of the Pennsylvania Code mandates that "full-time faculty members shall constitute a majority of the total number of full-time-equivalent faculty employed by the institution". Thus the need for a majority full-time faculty appears to be the settled law of the land. Nonetheless, Phoenix, Strayer and several other members of the for-profit colleges and university (FPCU) gang operate in Pennsylvania entirely sans full-time faculty.

I've oft wondered how this is possible. I'm not sure how close to parity most PA schools come, but the model here is FT free by design. How does that fly? Apparently FPCUs' status as foreign corporations affords them exemption. Whether this is by accident/loophole or design is unclear. I'd like more details here, and maybe I'll find them in the law of higher education class I hope to take.

FPCUs are poorly understood, their ascendancy is unprecedented and they are way different than anyone else. Myth, ideology and FUD surround them. Not long ago I read New Players, Different Game, the pathologically evenhanded, data-dense work by Tierny and Hentske, and finished feeling pretty good that a) FPCUs have a valid role to play and b) that federal legislation keeps their less noble tendencies more or less in check.

This Pennsylvania FT/FTE equivalent disparity leaves me much more skeptical. I've known about other bits of sketchiness, for example first-hand accounts of how Phoenix skirts the prohibition against commission-based compensation for admission reps by adjusting a rep's salary several times a year through performance reviews. One's salary can be adjusted dramatically up or down based on one's sales performance, closely approximating commission. I'm hopeful this practice will in time catch up with them and others who engage. But the FT/FTE disparity smacks of complicity (or maybe just an unfortunate loophole, I'm still not sure) and that's troubling.

So much enthusiasm for FPCUs reeks of ideological boosterism - hooray for free markets and the profit motive. The free hand will cure educations ills. Frighteningly, Maggie Spellings and the gang looks to fall squarely in this camp. And so much opposition is smug out-of-hand dismissiveness. I'm largely undecided. I'm impressed by the looks of things at Neumont University, for example, but most of the rest of the time I'm troubled. The real clincher will be how the employment market comes to view credentials from FPCUs.


Maybe I'll sign up for a course or two, in the name of science, and see for myself what the experience is like. Prolly not though.