Gotta give 'em credit...

From the article:

But while Phoenix may have framed its academic information (as many colleges do) in the most flattering possible ways, it remains virtually alone among its peers in the for-profit sector of higher education in revealing this sort of information.

"But we seem to be coming toward a tipping point [in favor of being more transparent], and I would bet that in the next three to five years, there will be a lot more easily accessible, publicly available data about the performance of many of our institutions."

The big challenge for Phoenix (to the extent that a university with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profit is challenged) and its peers in for-profit higher education is the perceived need to measure themselves not against one another, but against the traditional institutions -- largely community colleges and open-access public institutions -- with which they compete for students. With Phoenix and its peers charging significantly higher tuitions than most public institutions, for-profit colleges are feeling pressure (from regulators more than consumers, at least so far) to prove that the education they are delivering is worth the higher price.

And now, for the rest of the story...