Forward-Looking Phoenix

Founded in 1976 to serve working adults seeking higher education who couldn’t attend a traditional university environment, the University of Phoenix (UOPX) is currently the largest for-profit university with more than 420,000 undergraduate and 78,000 graduate students. Most students take their courses and complete their curriculum online but can also attend classes at one of the 200 nondescript “campuses” (in quotes, because they are mostly beige buildings that don’t trigger notions of idyllic campuses) around the U.S. — in fact, they state that there is a campus “within 10 miles of 87 million Americans.” UOPX has long been under scrutiny because of the perceived lower level of education and standards that other universities strive for, and it also