Rebel with a Cause: The Entrepreneur Who Created the University of Phoenix and the For-Profit Revolution in Higher Education Hardcover - 2000

First line

I have been successful in business-very successful.

From the jacket flap

"The three behaviors that have served me bestin my career as union organizer and entrepreneur are implacable opportunism, joy in conflict, and getting a thrill from taking risks-none of them a safe ride."-John Sperling
A little over twenty years ago, professor John Sperling designed a program that would allow working adults to earn a college degree in the same time it took full-time students on campus. This venture not only challenged many of the sacred tenets of academe, it also provoked a hostile opposition that bordered on rage.
Realizing that a new, independent structure was necessary for his revolutionary ideas to survive, Sperling abandoned his academic career to found what would become the nation's largest and fastest-growing private university-making him, at age fifty-three, a very late-blooming entrepreneur and, at age seventy-three, an IPO megamillionaire.
Rebel With A Cause is the dramatic tale of how a man born into poverty went on to establish the for-profit Institute for Professional Development, the University of Phoenix, and Apollo Group, America's largest higher education company. Here, Sperling tells his remarkable story for the first time. He was ostracized by his peers for debasing higher education and faced an unrelenting effort by the defenders of traditional education to destroy him by regulation. He recounts his successful battles to defend his vision of adult higher education from enemies in the academy, in the accrediting associations, in state and federal bureaucracies, and in the press.
This book offers a revealing look at a man whose radical behavior-challenging authority, ignoring the advice of experts-could have been his undoing, but instead enabled him to tap into the skyrocketing market of adult education and turn it into an innovative, for-profit industry. It explores how he grew the University and its subsidiaries into what is now known as Apollo Group, which boasts over 125,000 students, an annual growth rate of 25 percent, and 1999 revenues of $500 million.
Rebel With A Cause also provides an enlightening glimpse of the intersection of business and education policy, examining Sperling's contrarian view of running higher education like a business-and, in the process, keeping America competitive. His cost-effective model, developed during the birth of the University of Phoenix, shows how the nation must adapt its education policy in order to produce skilled employees capable of competing in today's information economy.
The unforgettable story of the man who redefined American higher education, Rebel With A Cause offers wisdom and inspiration, teaching lessons all business professionals and educators would do well to heed.

Media reviews

Citations

• Booklist, 12/15/1999, Page 744
• Kirkus Reviews, 11/15/1999, Page 1796
• Library Journal, 01/01/2000, Page 130