Andrea Jarrell passed on to me an item she saw in the always-useful Inside Higher Ed. It’s an interview with Harold T. Shapiro, the new chairman of DeVry, Inc.

Yes, that DeVry. The for-profit school. Before you turn up your nose, know this: Shapiro is former president of University of Michigan.

Many of my friends and colleague probably share my initial gut reaction to things like DeVry, University of Phoenix, and Strayer University: They can’t be rigorous. They’re just diploma mills. They exist only to get Federal financial aid dollars.

But the interview with Shapiro has me thinking differently.

Two highlights:

Higher education is such a subsidized activity that it wasn’t clear to me that a market-funded organization really could overcome the competition represented by these very large subsidies. Now what’s happened over time, of course, is these subsidies have declined as states have had different kinds of priorities or have had budget constraints of one kind or another; the subsidies to higher education have gone down very substantially. . . .

Yes, I thought that a private organization could [possibly] be more effective, it could be more nimble, it could be more efficient in certain ways, but I just thought that wasn’t enough to overcome the subsidy [disadvantage]. But I was wrong. They found a way to operate extremely efficiently and now increasingly through the online service and the broadening of the curriculum they have found niches out there that just weren’t being served.

What about quality? How can for-profit schools really provide what “real” schools do?

I think there’s a general skepticism that people that are in this for profit aren’t going to serve their students well. I feel the other way around, because if DeVry doesn’t serve their students, we’ll be out of business.

I was president of the University of Michigan. It’s not going out of business anytime in our lifetime. DeVry could go out of business in years — not in decades — if it wasn’t serving its students. So it has to pass a much tougher test than traditional higher education does. I hardly think we do it perfectly; I’m sure we have many improvements that we could make, but we’re always on the trail, always trying to do something. . . .

If you look, for example, at how quickly we adapted to online education, we’re much more fully adapted to that than any traditional school that I know of. Now I don’t know them all, so maybe this is an exaggerated statement, but we have an extraordinary number of students who get their degrees partly in classrooms, partly online. The coursework that we’ve developed online in the areas that I’m familiar with, like statistics which I taught for a number of years [at other institutions], is really high quality.

These are excellent points, and Shapiro is a serious person who merits serious attention.

This is an area to watch in the future.