EXTENDING MARKET SHARE? Invisible Adjunct comments on a Jeffrey Selingo report from Washington, D.C. on the credentialling going on at the University of Phoenix. Her take: it poses less of a threat to traditional universities than many believe, but doesn't really teach anything new. There are problems: when the modal opening phrase in class discussions is "At my company," you're not too far from "People of the same trade seldom gather together, even for diversion or merriment, but that the conversation turns to some conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." (I'm quoting from memory, the words might not all be right.) Nothing new there either: my dad used to supplement his income by teaching the night circuits course at Marquette University. He didn't have much use for the younger Marquette students, but it was a great chance for the practitioners to compare notes on solutions to industrial control problems. (As far as I know, there was no calendar with moon phases in the classroom, only a clock and a crucifix.) Moreover, Phoenix might be functioning as a sub-contractor. Businesses spend lots of money on training because the high schools and the colleges have graduated people who can't quite do it. Dad had an interesting story of a trainee engineer, fresh out of a good engineering college, who hooked the starting circuit to itself, and these guys had no concept of voltages measured in the hundreds. The real threat to the conventional university is in its failure to decide whether it's heir to the monastery, or trade school with frat houses, or heir to the Gulag. (I'm only half-kidding about that last; read this for some thoughts on all three.)