The Whitney International University System (WIUS) is a relatively new player in the "global" higher education arena, with a mission to provide increased access to higher education to prospective students in developing countries. WIUS is targeting students who historically have been unable to afford college tuition, and who live in areas where higher education is not so readily available to them.

WIUS is a for-profit enterprise based in Dallas, Texas, founded by Randy Best of Best Associates, who is also the current chairman of the university system. Best Associates is a privately owned merchant banking institution also headquartered in Dallas.

It is noted on the WIUS website that higher education enrollments have grown tremendously in the developing world, but access is limited, with an unmet demand estimated to be in the range of 35 to 50 million students. "The growth in demand is accelerating, overwhelming the ability of existing public and private institutions to meet the needs of students. . . The inability to meet the demand provides Whitney with an enormous opportunity."

To get a better understanding of how WIUS operates, Educational Pathways interviewed Douglas L. Frederick, named WIUS chief executive officer in June 2007. Frederick has several decades of executive-level experience, formerly having leadership and strategy-development responsibilities with such companies as EDS, The Boeing Company and the Netherlands-based Baan Company. He is also an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

It is interesting to note that Frederick mentioned the work of distinguished University of Michigan Professor C. K. Prahalad, author of a popular business book with a globalization theme, titled "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Eradicating Poverty Through Profits." Prahalad’s book is about how to alleviate worldwide poverty (4 billion people at the bottom of the world’s socio-economic pyramid who earn less than $1,500 annually) as "resilient entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers." ¹  According to an article in Business Week, "The Fortune of the Bottom of the Pyramid" has been hailed as one of the most important business books in recent years. ²  Prahalad advocates an approach to help the poor that "involves partnering with them to innovate and achieve sustainable win-win scenarios where the poor are actively engaged and, at the same time, the companies producing products and services to them are profitable." ³

According to Frederick, WIUS has a similar mindset. He explains that WIUS is built around providing accessible, affordable and quality higher education to students in developing countries by using sophisticated educational and administrative technologies in conjunction with the conversion of existing local buildings and infrastructures into satellite classrooms  - and to do it at a profit. However, it seems that this model has yet to be fully proven in real practice.

In short, WIUS is attempting to facilitate cost- and learning-effective teaching and learning environments. These could be created through the use of distance learning facilities in rural areas (there are about 2,000 such facilities in Brazil, for instance), or it might be a local building or a classroom in a local high school that stands empty during the evenings, Frederick says. The technology that WIUS brings into these spaces is driven by satellite distribution of its course management system and all the educational technologies that typically goes with that. In addition, WIUS brings together existing faculty and administrators in their host countries to teach and administer courses in an online, blended or face-to-face modality.

Basically, the way it works is that students show up to take courses at a satellite classroom that is conveniently located close to where they live, or, in some cases, the course could be offered fully online, and students might utilize a local Internet café to access it regularly. What makes it all affordable, however, is the distribution system that WIUS facilitates, says Frederick.

"With our distribution system, using two-way satellite; using some of the technologies we are developing for distributing education content, programming, project work, homework assignments, course testing and more; using advanced technologies and what computers can do for you today - we can touch many more students," Frederick says. He further explains how this kind of distribution system can work very effectively in rural areas of developing countries where there might be a local high school, for instance, in which its graduates typically cannot afford to further their education, or they can’t get accepted into the publicly funded higher education system in their mother country because it has an extremely competitive and limited admissions process.

"If we take that same high school and utilize their classrooms in the evening and put in place a distributed solution that includes computers and a high-tech satellite receiver, we can bring in 30 or 40 students for one a one- or two-hour class twice each night. Then all of a sudden you have more utilization of that facility and have reduced the cost of students to get a higher education. That high school that had seen many of their students walk away and not further their education is now invested in having these same students earn a college degree in such areas of study as small business administration, tourism, accounting and education - the kinds of professions that can make their lives more productive and move them up the value chain."

Frederick adds that this kind of education model can drop the price of what it would cost for a student to earn a degree by "anywhere up to 70 percent." The model he refers to is assisted by educational and student administrative support technologies that enable faculty members to teach up to 300 students at a time. He explains that the model takes care of fixed costs - such as the cost of distributing course information and the cost of teacher salaries - and then it also allows for investment in technologies for such things as testing, course evaluation and increased student services. In the end, "you can actually make a business plan work and drop the price in these regions by 25, 35 or 70 percent," Frederick says.

As noted on the WIUS website, "the Whitney system facilitates rapid enrollment growth in a world hungry for higher education. It is helping to achieve the goal of equal access to information, knowledge and opportunity for all global citizens." Its current ownership and joint venture alliances with university partners in Argentina, Brazil, Columbia, Panama and Peru have thus far been on-campus programs, with about 35,000 students currently enrolled in traditional face-to-face courses, Frederick says. During the fall of 2007, WIUS piloted some of its non-traditional programs at these institutions, he added. "The rollout of distance and distributed education programs are just beginning. As you might guess, what we’re trying to do is get experience with it and to make sure it works in a fashion that we want before we go off and tell everybody what we are doing."

Frederick also emphasized that WIUS is "trying to go into the lower economic strata of these countries," helping to provide people in such areas with an opportunity to change their social history. "Now we believe that we can do this partnership with a joint venture in different countries to use the core of the businesses that we have, where these universities already exist with these faculty, to create curriculum and courseware that can be used and utilized across multiple different cultures and languages to really make education affordable in these developing countries.

"What we’re all about is not going out and just soliciting people to go to school, but trying to find a way to bring a rapidly decreasing price of education into the marketplace and generally make it a much broader access to the market. . . This is really a mission-driven organization, not just a business-economics-can-we-make-a-bunch-of-money" organization.