For-Profit School Calls Becker's Prez | Zirkle leaves Worcester and heads to Connecticut
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Kenneth Zirkle (left), former president of Becker College in Worcester, has accepted a post at Post University in Waterbury, Conn., a for-profit school owned by a private equity firm. John Prosser (right), former CEO of LaPointe International in Worcester, will step in as acting head until an interim leader can be identified.
When Kenneth Zirkle joined Becker College in Worcester as president he was charged with revitalizing a college that was struggling to break even.
And now, some four years later, Zirkle has helped build Becker into a strong four-year college with more programming and enrollment.
So, why would Zirkle want to leave the comfort of a gig where he has received resounding praise?
Well, the honest answer, according to Zirkle, was that he certainly wasn’t looking. But Post University in Waterbury, Conn., found him and he’ll be the president there starting Sept. 1.
“Somehow they (Post University officials) came up with my name,” Zirkle told the Worcester Business Journal. “I got a call out of the clear blue, but kept saying I wasn’t interested, going on for months and months…I hope I can live up to their expectations.”
And those expectations are high, according to Mark Jennings, chairman of the board of trustees of Post University and managing partner of Generation Partners, the Greenwich, Conn.-based private equity firm that acquired the school in 2004.
“Ken is someone whose character and integrity and enthusiasm just shine through the moment you meet him,” Jennings said.
Unique Model
Post University isn’t like most colleges. It was founded in 1890, but was acquired by a Japanese university in 1990 when the school was struggling. Fifteen years later, the school was acquired by Generation Partners and was converted into a for-profit institution.
The for-profit college model is gaining in popularity, most notably with online schools geared to working adults like the University of Phoenix, which is owned by the Apollo Group. According to the most recent federal statistics, there were 986 for-profit colleges (453 four-year and 533 two-year) in the United States in 2007. That’s a 50 percent increase from the 650 for-profit institutions just 10 years earlier.
But unlike the University of Phoenix, Post University has an established campus, and is even expanding its footprint with the recent completion of a new residence hall.
The chance to work at a for-profit institution had its own allure, according to Zirkle.
“It’s a whole different venue,” he said of the for-profit model. “When you’ve been in higher education for as long as I have, it’s hard to come up with something that’s entirely different. And that’s intriguing.”
Jennings said that the for-profit model may be one of the last rays of hope for many small, struggling colleges that lack the comfortable endowments of the nation’s largest private schools.
“At Post our mission is really to prove to all of the community and the regulators that we can come in as private capital and have a double bottom line that really focuses on the quality of education,” he said.
Now, Becker College is forced to look ahead to a school year without Zirkle at the helm. Helping the school get through the transition is John Prosser, who brings a tremendous background in business to the job.
Prosser, a resident of West Boylston, is now acting president of Becker after serving on the school’s board since 1998, including two years as chairman. Prosser’s business background includes a stint as CFO of Springfield-based Smith & Wesson. More recently he was part owner and operator of several machine tool companies including Quamco Inc. in Holden, Lapointe International of Worcester and GF Wright Steel & Wire.
Prosser said he’ll serve as acting president until the board appoints an interim head, which will most likely be at its Sept. 26 meeting. In the meantime, Prosser will help in the transition, although he admits that he never would have predicted he’d be running a college.
But, he said, “business is business.” While in his previous manufacturing career his focus was on having the most cost effective and productive equipment, in higher education the focus has to be on “how well you utilize your people resources.”
Prosser said Becker’s enrollment will probably be flat this year, partly as a function of changing demographics.
Mark Bilotta, head of the Colleges of Worcester Consortium, said he hadn’t heard that Zirkle was looking for a new job, but wasn’t surprised that he would be moving on. Zirkle, he said, had been at Becker for more than four years, and the average tenure for a college is president is five to seven years.
Where Zirkle excelled at Becker was by “seeing the writing on the wall,” according to Bilotta.
“He saw that he had to be very proactive in securing Becker’s niche by looking for new opportunities and investing in new facilities,” he said.
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