Reflecting on the 1968 professors’ strike in his memoir, John Sperling called it “one of the most liberating experiences of my life” because he no longer cared what anyone in academia thought about him. And he decided he was going to find a way out.

The opportunity to leave traditional academia arrived in the form of a federal grant designed to lower the juvenile delinquency rate among working-class kids in the city of Sunnyvale, Calif. Sperling thought the best way to do that would be to work with local teachers and police officers.

He enrolled 30 teachers and police officers in a class and divided them into groups. Each group had to design, conduct and evaluate a project that addressed the problem of juvenile delinquency. Sperling encouraged them to use their experiences at work to inform their research. At the end of the class, all but two of the students signed up for another class. When that class was done, they told online payday loan Coleman Sperling they wanted to take more classes.

“They got fascinated with the process of education,” he says. “It grabbed their minds and they said, ‘Oh my God, this is fascinating. And we want to stay. Not only do we want to stay, we want degrees.'”

A photograph of University of Phoenix students in 1979, posted on a bulletin board at Apollo Group headquarters in San Francisco. (Photo: Emily Hanford)

At the age of 53, Sperling had begun his career as an entrepreneur

“In 1970, adults lacked effective access even to ineffective higher education,” writes Sperling. “Supposedly, the mission of my own university was to serve the entire community, but a working adult wanting to pursue a degree was offered courses designed for kids just out of high school, taught by professors who considered it their job to deliver the subject matter in lectures scheduled for two or three nights per week. With great persistence, an adult learner could expect to earn a degree in 6 to 10 years — for some, it took 20.”

Sperling decided what higher education needed was a new way for working adults to go to school. So he sketched out a degree program that looked a lot like what he’d been doing with the teachers and police officers. “The students loved it and insisted it would draw hundreds of working adults,” he writes.

But when he went to San Jose State administrators with his idea, they said no. “The people who would have to approve the program didn’t like me, and didn’t give a damn about having more students, especially adults,” writes Sperling.

A colleague told Sperling that if he wanted to invent something new in higher education, he was going to have to find a school that was struggling and needed new students. At the time, an established university like San Jose State had plenty of taxpayer funding and plenty of students who wanted the degrees they already offered.

Sperling saw the university’s rejection of his idea for a degree program as a form of class bias, and he was not going to be deterred. So he took his idea to a Jesuit university in California that was in financial trouble and needed new students. Soon Sperling got a contract with another struggling college, and then another. His business was called The Institute for Professional Development, or IPD. He took a year’s leave from San Jose State, and, “because fortune smiled,” he never returned.

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