Private college plans expansion

The nation’s largest private university is preparing to expand its Spokane campus.

The University of Phoenix has 213,000 students on 151 campuses and learning centers in 30 states. In Spokane, it occupies 3,000 square feet of office space in the Rock Pointe complex north of downtown. But demolition is scheduled to begin Monday on the site of the university’s planned 13,000-square-foot building in Spokane Valley.

The new building at 8721 E. Mission is scheduled to be complete in March 2005, said Al Payne, a partner in Argonne Forest LLC, the property owner. The university will lease the building on the site just south of Interstate 90 off Argonne Road.

“That space is very central to this entire valley,” said Mark Cameron, the university’s regional vice president for the Northwest, of the planned new building. Cameron said the university likes to open branches in high-visibility, centralized locations.

The $2.3 million, single-story structure will be 75 percent classrooms with the rest devoted to office space and student services, Payne said.

The University of Phoenix came to Spokane last July and offers degrees in business and information technology that are primarily completed on-line. The Spokane campus currently has about 200 students enrolled. Courses typically cost about $1,000 apiece and last five to six weeks. Students are required to be in class, in Spokane, only a couple of times, and the rest of the coursework occurs on-line. Students are only permitted to take one class at a time, because adults focus best on one subject at a time, Cameron said.

Founded in 1976, the University of Phoenix targets working adults who want to return to school or continue their education. In 2003, more than half the university’s students studied business, at the undergraduate or graduate level, and more than half were women. In Spokane, the average student is 34 years old.

The university employs 13 people and likely will hire two more people as it moves to the new building, said Paul Green, campus director. However, faculty members are separate from administrative personnel. The 30 faculty members teach courses as independent contractors and work in the fields they teach. A minimum of a master’s degree is required to be a faculty member, Cameron said.

As the university grows in Spokane, Cameron said, it may add other fields of study, such as education, healthcare or criminal justice.

Cameron said the university expects enrollment to grow at the Spokane branch to “several hundred” students within the next three to four years. The Boise branch opened three years ago and already has 600 students enrolled, he said.

“We don’t cater to the ‘just-out-of-high-school’ student,” Cameron said. “We cater to the working adult.”