REED GRAD PROFITS FROM EDUCATION

John Sperling, a sharecroppers' son who became a multimillionaire with his
own university, plants his 15th campus in the Portland area

PHOENIX - John Sperling winced as he reached far back into the shadows of a
past he'd sooner forget for a fond memory of his youth in Portland.

The sharecroppers' son who endured hardship and loneliness to barely
graduate from high school and somehow get into Reed College scratched
behind his ear.

The bifocaled professor who dumped an academic career to launch the
University of Phoenix, the country's biggest private university, stared
into his cappuccino.

The iconoclastic multimillionaire whose approach to educating working
adults is rattling and reshaping the landscape of higher education took a
long sip.

"I'm trying to think what in heaven's name about Portland I really liked,"
he said gruffly, still coming up empty. "I'm doing my best."

Sperling's University of Phoenix officially opens its 15th campus and first
in the Portland area this week, but he finds nothing satisfying in
branching out into his former hometown. To the 76-year-old, Portland is
just another stop on a lucrative march that's shaking up higher education
not only in Oregon but also across the country.

Sperling finds nothing poignant in his return to a place he moved to as a
teen-ager with his mother after his father died, a place where they were so
poor, said his son, Peter, he had to steal chickens to eat.

But in John Sperling's difficult childhood are the beginnings of a life
hardened by isolation, shaped by a willingness to take chances, skeptics be
damned.

"The influences of his childhood made him a loner and just incredibly
tenacious," said Peter Sperling, 38, vice president of the Apollo Group,
the University of Phoenix's parent company. "He'll go through walls to do
what needs to get done."

Talking in his spacious corner office on the University of Phoenix campus,
John Sperling plays his part as an irreverent and irascible entrepreneur
perfectly. Asked whether a sculpture of the Madonna's face hanging outside
his office door holds any religious significance, he bellowed, "God, no!"

He is an animated, articulate salesman for his business. Yet he is
reluctant to say much about his early years.

"Much of the drive he's had to build Apollo and Phoenix is somehow related
to all that, but I'm not exactly sure how," Peter Sperling said. "I can't
fathom what those forces were. . . . I can't feel what it's like not to be
loved."

Asked where he derived his ambition and drive, John Sperling barked, "Who
in the hell knows?" He said he didn't want to get into a nature vs. nurture
debate.

Sperling was born in Freedom Schoolhouse, a hamlet in rural Missouri, the
youngest of six children. His parents were itinerant farmers,
sharecroppers, who shuttled between the fields and Kansas City, depending
on where the work was. His father was abusive, Sperling's son said, and the
boy hated him.

When Sperling was 16, his father died, and he and his mother, to whom he
was not close, moved to Oregon.

The destitute pair stopped in Lakeview in Southeast Oregon for a while. It
was there that the boy befriended a magpie that flew into a barn and
asphyxiated on exhaust fumes from the school bus sitting inside. The story,
one of the few that he has related to his son about his youth, has no moral
or lesson. It is just desolately sad.

Moving on to Portland, Sperling attended the now-defunct Washington High
School. His mother found work as a cleaning lady, and he took odd jobs
running errands or busing tables.

Hungry and unhappy at home, he was just as miserable at school. He cut
class and got in trouble for shooting craps.

"I managed to graduate, miracle of miracles," he said. "I was just a
wretched student. . . . I didn't like the teachers; they didn't like me. I
wasn't a very likable person, that's for sure. I was always getting hassled
by the assistant principal - he's the only one whose name I remember."

Sperling said he graduated barely literate but halfway decent in math.
Looking to escape his situation, he joined the merchant marine, where
seamen taught him to appreciate books as he sailed the Pacific. He spent
three years at sea before stopping in San Francisco, where he went to a
junior college.

He returned to Portland and attended Reed College, where he thrived on the
radically charged, just-about-anything-goes campus environment.

"Once you go through the experience (of Reed), you never get over it," he
said. "The intellectual intensity makes it a world unto itself."

After a semester at college, however, he joined the U.S. Navy and Army Air
Forces; he did not see combat duty during World War II. When the war was
over, he rushed back to Reed with the financial aid of the G.I. Bill.

He kept a foot in the off-campus world, working as a junior engineer in
area shipyards. Sperling also recalled the brothels and gambling dens of
the city's seedy side. "It was a wide-open town in that time. It was
great," he said.

Sperling noted that Reed graduates almost felt obligated to seek
doctorates, which is exactly what he did.

He attended two prestigious institutions of higher learning: the University
of California at Berkeley and Cambridge University in England. He married
and then divorced when his only child was 5. He became a professor of
economic history, and eventually wound up at San Jose State University.

But he found academic life stultifying. He began an effort to unionize San
Jose State's faculty, leading an unsuccessful strike that earned the enmity
of administrators and colleagues.

He learned to be a pariah, which, he wrote in his autobiography/manifesto,
called "Against All Odds," was one of the most liberating experiences of
his life.

"Without that lesson, I could never have become a successful entrepreneur,"
he wrote. "The lesson was simple - ignore your detractors and those who say
that what you are doing is wrong, against regulations or illegal."

Sperling found his calling in 1970 when he received a grant to teach
teachers and police officers how to deal with juvenile delinquency.

"Instead of snotty college kids, you had motivated adults," he said.

He saw the potential of making money by targeting a market - older, working
adults - that most higher education institutions were overlooking. But when
Sperling tried to expand the program and offer degrees to adults,
university administrators shot down his experiment.

He took a leave in 1972 and founded a small company dedicated to teaching
working adults, the seed of what was to become the University of Phoenix in
1977. A year later, the school gained accreditation from the North Central
Association of Colleges and Schools, a necessary ingredient for success
because it meant students could get government financial aid.

And so, in his mid-50s, Sperling left academia to try his hand at being a
businessman.

>From the start, the University of Phoenix was tagged as a diploma mill. It
>has never shaken the rap.

Indeed, the school is in many ways the antithesis of the three
tradition-bound schools Sperling attended: Reed, Berkeley and Cambridge.
The main campus off Interstate 10 near Phoenix's airport resembles a
corporate headquarters more than it does a college campus.

It has seen its enrollment boom to 42,000 students during the 1990s as it
opened enrollment policies and moved aggressively into new markets.

But it is still regarded as "McEducation" by its critics, who point out the
school doesn't have tenured professors or an actual library. Its faculty
are paid by the class and are required to work in the area they teach. The
library is located online and contains no books, only magazine and journal
articles.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that students must be employed and at
least 23 years old. The school offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in
a range of disciplines, most of them business-related.

Sperling thinks his school's success has influenced more traditional
universities that are adopting practical, hands-on approaches to teaching
and tapping the market of adult learners.

But he said in a speech last fall at Reed that he doesn't envision the
death of the traditional liberal arts education.

"I believe that Reed and other elite liberal arts colleges will function
pretty much as they do now," he said. "And, as for the University of
Phoenix, it will continue to grow in size and influence and will become
increasingly powerful as a transformative institution."

The University of Phoenix is utterly different in most ways from Reed, with
its classical core curriculum, heavy on Homer and Virgil. Officials take
pride in the pervasive practicality of what they do.

"It doesn't make sense for us to teach chemistry or biology because it
doesn't feed into what we do," said William Pepicello, the university's
associate vice president and dean of general studies.

On the other hand, the school is akin to schools such as Reed in its
direct, no-nonsense approach to learning, without the usual extracurricular
distractions. Both also take particular pride in being unconventional.

In Oregon, the university comes up frequently in conversations in higher
education circles. Gov. John Kitzhaber made a passing reference to it
recently in a higher education policy speech. Many area educators tend to
be dismissive of the school but also see it as something of a challenge.

"If we can't turn out a higher-quality product than the University of
Phoenix, we don't belong in the marketplace," said Roger Ahlbrandt,
business dean at Portland State University. "I don't view them as
competition."

The University of Phoenix is criticized for turning a profit. But
underestimated for most of its history, it has a bottom line showing it
can't be ignored.

"When you do (make a profit) at IBM, we think it's the greatest thing since
round rocks, but when you do it in higher education, we think we've
betrayed Socrates," said Bob Salmon, director of academic affairs at the
main campus.

With campuses opening and enrollment booming, the Apollo Group's profits
have grown steadily. Apollo stock has increased from $2.25 when it went
public in December 1994 to nearly $50, on a split-adjusted basis. The
company's market value is estimated at more than $2 billion.

Sperling remains the heart of the enterprise, described by employees as
brilliant but brusque. Among the words they use to describe him are
"eccentric," "revolutionary," "demanding," "blustery" and "a heck of a nice
guy." Few say they really know him, but they appreciate how deeply he's
devoted himself to the company.

"I, for one, can't imagine UOP without him," said Beth Aguiar, the dean of
undergraduate business. "He's the heart and soul and mind."

Sperling's desire to forge ahead in expansion still consumes him.

"This guy is the hottest thing in higher education right now," said Reed
President Steve Koblik, who has encouraged Sperling to be a more active
alumnus. Sperling recently donated about $600,000 to finance the studies of
Reedies pursuing doctoral degrees at Cambridge, where Sperling earned his
doctorate.

"What is fascinating about John is he didn't start his entrepreneurial
activity until his 50s, and it didn't really catch until his 60s," Koblik
said. "He's doing all this at an age when a lot of us are retiring to the
beach."

The University of Phoenix is continuing to open campuses: Vancouver,
British Columbia, and Oklahoma City are next on the list. Sperling recently
returned from China, where he is hoping to realize his longheld dream of
taking his school global.

"I'd like to sell education to the Chinese," he said. "There are a lot of
Chinese."

Sperling also is gaining a higher profile in his pet political cause, drug
law reform. He has poured money into statewide initiatives to effectively
legalize marijuana, spending $50,000 recently on Oregon's effort to put
such an initiative on the election ballot.

He has no firsthand experience of problems with current drug law, he said.
He objects to it because he thinks current policies are "stupid . . . a
colossal failure."

But with all the success, Sperling remains a solitary figure.

He doesn't socialize much. He collects art and listens to opera. He lives
on his own with his dog, Missy, and lives to work, his son said.

"He's entirely engaged and excited by what he does," Peter Sperling said.
"But I wouldn't necessarily say he's the happiest guy. He'd love to have
closer personal relationships, but because of his childhood, I think he's
afraid to get close."

Still, Sperling understands that a willingness to go it alone has been both
a cause and a product of his success. He believes in his creation, and
nothing shakes that belief. The critics, he said, mean nothing to him.

"It goes back to being the most disliked person on campus," he said. "It
never bothered me. They never attacked my sense of self-esteem."

To his naysayers, he said only: "I laugh all the way to the bank."

Romel Hernandez, of The Oregonian's Family & Education Team, writes about
higher education. Contact him by phone at 294-7669 or by fax at 294-4039.
Send e-mail to romelhernandez@news.oregonian.com or postal mail to 1320
S.W. Broadway, Portland, Ore. 97201.