Buying and Selling Online Schools: The Unusual Career of Michael Clifford (Part 7)

SM: How do you handle your regulatory relationships?

MC: We have to manage our regulatory relationships very carefully. That is one area where we can lose all of our money. We were all very nervous about the Obama administration and what they would do to market-driven education. Lately, we have been very pleased with Secretary of Education [Arne] Duncan’s approach to education.

I have said from day one that education is a key to America’s economic stimulus. Give me a 50-year-old laid-off auto worker, and I will re-train that person in the online world to compete in the world marketplace. I believe that in my heart. We have to re-educate the population that is 45 to 55 years old.

SM: We need custom, tailored programs to move these people into other disciplines such as solar system integration. A for-profit university model is very effective there. Give me a synthesis of what you like about the Obama administration’s policy on for-profit education.

MC: The large non-profit institutions have been very vocal against market-driven schools. They view us as a real threat, as they should. We run more efficiently, there is no tenure, and we only teach courses that are relevant. You won’t find anything on the Roman empire or the importance of women in comic books. Everything we teach is career-oriented. We also do not teach a class unless we have 15 students.

The Obama administration is open to the best practices being applied to inefficient state programs. Market-driven schools are constantly trying to improve their quality by recruiting top academics from the state schools. The two factions do need to stop fighting and start focusing on the student.

SM: The market is so large that I can’t imagine why the two factions cannot co-exist with ease.

MC: I think that on the post-secondary level they do. The larger problem is K-12 teachers’ unions. They have a chokehold on that education system, which is one reason it is broken.

SM: They elected Obama, so that won’t be addressed soon.

MC: True, but we have been pleased with the administration’s approach to getting everyone to work together. The focus needs to be on adult education, because if you are 40 to 50 and do not know how to operate a computer, where are you going to work?

SM: Adult education is a very important piece of the re-energizing of America’s workforce. All of this outsourcing and off-shoring will continue. We need to learn to live with it and deal with it, which means we have to re-program the culture of the workforce to tackle these challenges.

MC: I agree. Another topic I am hot on is all the talk of the new health care program. It frustrates me. Really, the key to the health care program is the doctors’ associations, the AMA, and nurses’ associations allowing us to teach more doctors and nurses. It is a supply and demand problem.

SM: There is a piece of the health care system that is inefficient. You do not need to be a fully trained doctor to administer a lot of the medical care that is actually administered.

MC: Exactly. There are tens of thousands of people who would love to be caregivers, yet we have not been able to open a medical school in America in 80 years. Doctors like making a lot of money. If they restrict the number of doctors, the higher their paychecks go. In nursing we have thousands of people on our waiting lists. Nurses’ unions will not allow us to teach more nurses. There are 400 nurses in Phoenix making over $125,000 a year.

I argue that there are tens of thousands of young people, up to age 26, who would love to be a nurse for $35,000 a year. They are not allowed to go to school. What happens when we extend health benefits to another 30 million to 40 million people? We do not have enough doctors and nurses as it is.

SM: I have really enjoyed your story.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Buying and Selling Online Schools: The Unusual Career of Michael Clifford
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