Florida 'edupreneurs'

Florida 'edupreneurs'

education by Jean Gruss | Editor/Lee-Collier

Donald Jones and his family have created and managed schools and career colleges all over Florida. Their formula for success has been based on this basic business tenet: Pay attention to the customer.

Donald Jones was an "edupreneur" long before the term was coined during the recent boom in for-profit education-based companies.

Jones and his family have acquired and built schools and colleges throughout Florida over the decades, starting with his grandmother's school in Jacksonville in 1918. By some estimates, the Jones schools have graduated more than 70,000 students. The latest success: Southwest Florida College, a career college with campuses in Fort Myers and Tampa.

The Jones family transformed Southwest Florida College from a small court-reporting school in Fort Myers with 187 students 12 years ago to an accredited career college with more than 1,500 students and more than $20 million in revenues today.

A Fort Myers-based nonprofit organization created by Jones, called Compass Rose Foundation, owns and operates the school. It's a family enterprise: Donald Jones is CEO, his wife Sharon Jones is treasurer, Donald's son Gregory Jones is president, Sharon Jones' son (Donald's stepson) Tom Timothy runs the Tampa campus and Sharon Jones' son-in-law Wayne Slater is vice president.

In addition to Southwest Florida College, the foundation acquired Sunstate Academy in 2003, a cosmetology school with campuses in Fort Myers and Clearwater. The school has 205 students in Fort Myers and 175 in Clearwater and had revenues of about $4 million in the fiscal year ended in June.

Despite its nonprofit status, the Joneses run the school like a business. There are no fancy fundraisers or golf outings for prospective wealthy donors. You won't find faculty councils dictating what courses should be offered or canceled.

Instead, the Joneses are intensely focused on two customers: students and employers. Success is judged by how well the college matches graduating students with employers who need them. The college's team of counselors claims a 96.1% job-placement success rate.

If there's low demand for a course or few employers clamor for it, the Joneses don't hesitate to cancel it. None of the instructors have tenures and they're accountable for their performance. "We respond to the market," Donald Jones says simply. "We really operate this college as a business."

The market's demographics are changing quickly. For example, more than 25% of Collier County's population is Hispanic and the Spanish-speaking population is growing rapidly in Southwest Florida. Jones says he's exploring the possibility of offering courses in Spanish or Creole in locations such as Immokalee and Lehigh Acres and helping those students translate their newfound knowledge to English.

So far, the nonprofit model has worked. For example, the foundation's nonprofit status and educational mission helped it raise a total of $6.6 million through the sale of tax-exempt bonds. But Donald Jones, 64, says he receives frequent calls from investors who want to acquire the school and operate it as a for-profit enterprise. Because of the complexity of such as deal and the question about what Compass Rose would do with the proceeds, Jones says his son, Gregory Jones, 35, will eventually be the one to make the call.

One thing is certain: If he had to do it over again, Jones says he would probably have created a for-profit company to operate Southwest Florida College. But even 12 years ago when his foundation acquired the school, education and profits were not viewed as compatible.

"Higher education is still going through what health care went through 20 to 30 years ago," Jones says. Hospitals once were considered off-limits to the corporate world because the thinking was that health care and profits weren't compatible. Of course, that's all changed today as investors and patients have discovered.

Now, the same thing is happening in the world of higher education. For example, companies such as publicly traded Apollo Group operate schools such as University of Phoenix, which has 282,300 students across the country.

"He is a strong entrepreneur," says Terry McMahan, president of Hodges University in Naples, another college that Jones started in 1989. "He's one of the pioneers in the career college arena."

Southwest Florida College's rise matches a statewide trend that has seen postsecondary schools and colleges triple their market share of overall enrollment between 1994 and 2004, according to Mangum Economic Consulting in a report to the Florida Association of Postsecondary Schools and Colleges.

In those 10 years, enrollment at schools such as Southwest Florida College rose by 314%. That compares with 31% enrollment growth for Florida's four-year public universities and 33% for independent four-year private, non-profit colleges and universities during the same period.

'The best blood drawers'

Many of the courses Southwest Florida College offers aren't ones that Web-based universities can easily poach. Some are simply not offered at other universities.

For example, you can't take a phlebotomy course online. Drawing blood from a patient can only be taught in a classroom setting. "They want to be the best blood drawers," says Gregory Jones.

Surgical technicians are among the jobs most in demand from both employers and students. Southwest Florida College has a classroom with all the latest equipment and a lifelike mannequin on which students can practice their skills.

Just 11% of the college's courses are online. Those online courses are more likely to be electives such as history and psychology. Most students still prefer to learn in classroom setting, especially when it comes to applied sciences. "They didn't come here looking for an online education," Gregory Jones says.

By contrast, the school is quick to cancel courses that aren't in demand by either students or employers. For example, it ditched its pharmacy technician course after finding that wages were too low to attract students and drugstore chains were training their own employees. "We test the marketplace constantly," says Gregory Jones.

The average age of students at Southwest Florida College is 26 and its halls are bustling both day and night. About 58% of the students attend classes at night. But lately the school has been attracting more high-school students who shy away from state universities and community colleges and want an education that will lead directly to a job. "Our background is not liberal arts," says Donald Jones.

Jones says that the college must achieve high job-placement results because its tuition tends to be higher. For example, it charges twice as much per credit hour as Florida Gulf Coast University, the subsidized state university in Fort Myers.

Except in a few fields, Gregory Jones says the college doesn't have trouble recruiting instructors with the real-world experience that students seek. That's because it can draw from the vast pool of retirees who move to Southwest Florida and get bored playing golf. Finding people with MBAs and JDs is easy. "They're a dime a dozen," he chuckles.

But finding instructors who have a master's degree in fine arts and have experience in graphic design using the latest software is much more challenging. "We've interviewed nationally for them," Jones says. One of the most effective ways he's found for recruiting nationally is the job-posting Web site Monster.com.

Recruiting students also is an ongoing effort. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, Compass Rose spent $461,929 with Gragg Advertising, a Kansas City advertising firm, according to the foundation's latest available tax return.

Among other efforts, the school focuses on direct-mail marketing to reach older prospective students and Web sites such as Yahoo and Google to find younger ones (type "Fort Myers college" on Google and the school's Web site, www.swfc.edu, appears prominently as a sponsored link.)

Expansion and growth

It expanded to Tampa in 2001 after it started a Microsoft training course. That turned out to be so successful that it began to add more courses and that campus now has 470 students despite the fact that there are 28 career colleges in Tampa.

Meanwhile, the Joneses are taking a similar approach to Sunstate Academy. The cosmetology school with campuses in Fort Myers and Clearwater will add spa management to its curriculum because of the proliferation of such facilities in hotels and resorts around the country.

Donald Jones, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, says schools like Southwest Florida College must be ready to face rising competition from for-profit companies in the postsecondary education business. "It is a new day," Jones says.

One way to do that is partnering with existing businesses. For example, the college may offer interior-design courses at the International Design Center in Estero, a center that features upscale furniture and decorating stores.

In addition, Jones wonders how projections of the growth of the Hispanic population in Southwest Florida will affect the college's curriculum. He envisions the college teaching courses in Spanish or Creole and then helping students learn English. Immokalee in eastern Collier County and Lehigh Acres in Lee County are two promising areas.

"They're here," Jones says.

And he has proven that taking the business approach of responding to the marketplace works, and works well.

REVIEW SUMMARY

College: Southwest Florida College

Industry: Career colleges

Key: Successful career colleges take their cues from well-run corporations.