Wilmington U. edges toward Pa. with plans for a 202 campus

Is this the college of the future?

As the state university system in Pennsylvania and other schools report falling enrollments, nonprofit Wilmington University says it has more than 20,000 students at its New Castle, Del., campus, eight Delaware and South Jersey satellite centers, and online. That's up from 19,000 last year and 9,000 in 2005, when president Jack Varsalona took the top job.

More than half are part time; two-thirds are 25 or older; many are nurses, cops and teachers whose employers encourage education. The school granted 3,200 degrees last year, including master's and doctorates, in such fields as nursing, education, criminal justice and info tech, each duly accredited.

"My degrees lead to jobs. That attracts people," Varsalona told me. Some courses meet on seven-week schedules to accommodate work, military or family needs. Many never meet: More than a third of Wilmington students take computer-based classes.

Pennsylvania students are next. Varsalona has plans for 200,000 square feet of classrooms on a 40-acre campus on Route 202 in Delaware, just below the Pennsylvania line, near Chadds Ford.

Tuition is around $1,000 for a three-credit course, comparable to state colleges here. There's no football team, but there is a cheerleading squad, along with NCAA Division II basketball teams (men's and women's) and other sports.

Wilmington's faculty, Varsalona says, includes 150 non-tenured full-timers and 600 part-time adjuncts, most paid $1,500 to $3,000 a course.

"Adjuncts are our secret weapons," he says. "They are people, working, who teach one or two courses a year. Or retired, maybe five courses a year." Nationally, "everybody is moving toward adjuncts," he added, saying that there are waiting lists to teach even the popular tech courses.

A strong president with part-time instructors is a model more nonprofit schools such as Wilmington are adopting from the for-profit world, says Barmak Nassirian, director of policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

"You have a charismatic, corporatist CEO, with a vision of growth, who is compensated accordingly," he told me. Nassirian's group worries that the erosion of a traditional full-time tenured faculty threatens educational quality.

Wilmington offers a "relatively strong core curriculum" of 39 required credits, including economics, and does a good job integrating students who have prior college experience, says Michael Poliakoff, a former Pennsylvania education official who is now vice president for policy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in Washington.

But Poliakoff also cites federal data that show Wilmington spent a relatively high $18 million on administration last year, versus $41 million on instruction, an inefficient ratio compared with other schools. It looks bad, he said, that Varsalona - who made $800,000 in salary and $700,000 in long-term compensation, comparable to the Ivy League - "is pulling down a very big salary at a time when great leadership will want to be as modest as possible."

"This university is different," counters Wilmington spokeswoman Laurie Bick. "Most of the time, when people try to do statistics and comparatives, we don't fit."

She said Varsalona's compensation shows that "the board sees value in him."

Before joining Wilmington, Varsalona served as director of development at the University of Delaware, where he earned three degrees, and was education aide to then-Gov. Pierre S. "Pete" du Pont, where he got an education in outsourcing non-essential services (there are no dorms or school-run cafeterias at Wilmington). He was a "visionary" principal from 1975 to 1988 at Wilmington's elite Ursuline Academy, says Cathie Field Lloyd, Ursuline's current principal.

At Wilmington, Varsalona enjoyed the backing of longtime board chairman Irénée du Pont, who had helped bail out the school when it ran in the red in its early years (it now has a modest $60 million endowment, segregated from operating funds).

Varsalona says judicious spending amid growth has made it possible to hold tuition increases below 2.5 percent a year. Over time, faster inflation at state and private colleges has reduced Wilmington's relative tuition below the level of the University of Delaware or New Jersey state schools. "We do it on purpose," Varsalona says. "We want people to be able to go here."

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