Rebel with a Cause: The Entrepreneur Who Created the University of Phoenix and the For-Profit Revolution in Higher Education

A little over 20 years ago, professor John Sperling designed a program that would allow working adults to earn a college degree in the same time it took full-time students on campus. This venture not only challenged many of the sacred tenets of academe, it also provoked a hostile opposition that bordered on rage. Realizing that a new, independent structure was necessary for his revolutionary ideas to survive, Sperling abandoned his academic career to found what would become the nation's largest and fastest growing private university- making him, at age 53, a very late-blooming entrepreneur and at age 73, an IPO megamillionaire