IMS Global: What is the profile of your average institutional partner?
GP: We currently have eight knowledge partners (our term for our college and university academic partners) and 18 programs that we work with and they are scattered all over the country. They're very diverse. We pride ourselves for working with large and small, public and private, regional and national higher education institutions. Currently our knowledge partners include very comprehensive public doctoral research extensive institutions like Boston University, University of Florida, and University of Cincinnati, and intensive doctoral research universities such as Portland State University. We also work with regional master's-level institutions like Eastern Kentucky University and some very small private colleges like Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences located here in Orlando, and Marylhurst University, a Catholic university near Portland, Oregon. Another midsize private institution we work with is Mountain State University in West Virginia that now has a strong distance learning offering and campuses in several states. We've only partnered with traditional not-for-profit institutions, helping them compete very effectively with the for-profits that have proven successful in distance learning. The programs we support include a broad spectrum of undergraduate and graduate degrees from a doctoral degree in Pharmacy at the University of Florida with a steady enrollment of almost 700 students to a bachelor's degree in Clinical Laboratory Sciences at the University of Cincinnati with 550 students and master's and doctoral degrees in Music Education at Boston University with almost 400 students enrolled in less than one year.
IMS Global: We understand you put a lot of emphasis on assessing the potential for online programs before you enter into a partnering relationship with an institution. What are some of the ways in which you measure the potential success of an online program?
GP: We take a comprehensive approach to assessing the marketplace potential for a given program. We do a lot of assessment work for institutions to assess the risk of offering a particular program without anticipating that we're going to be their partner on that program. And sometimes we assess a potential program and suggest that it's not the best risk for them to take. Or we see limited potential in a program and recommend they may want to offer it without our assistance to a smaller regional audience as an alternative delivery method either fully or partially online.
In particular, we look at programs that are exportable to a large distance learning audience, either regionally or nationally. We're interested in helping attract a new audience, students not currently being served in their regional mix.
We generally assess the risk for programs in three major areas: marketplace, readiness of the institutional student services infrastructure, and the curriculum and instruction. We have identified critical success factors in each area that serve to benchmark the characteristics of a particular program. On the marketplace side, we look at four major criteria. The first is the audience and industry profile. We're looking for information that will tell us how large the potential audience is, the industry growth rate for that particular audience, and the input and output occupations or professions. We identify the medium income for that audience, because certainly one of the things that will make a new degree attractive to working professional adults is the opportunity to increase their earning power. We also want to determine whether or not they can afford that education. Is the investment they're going to make in that education worth it to them on the other end? And also do they have sufficient earning power now to invest in that education, even if they get that financial aid or have tuition reimbursement from their employers?
