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ONE-ON-ONE - October
2002
by Ed G. Lane
'Stay the Course, Be Honest, and
Give Students More than Their Money's Worth'
The head of the Sullivan University System talks about the school's
in tying education to market needs
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Dr. A.R. "Al"
Sullivan
President and CEO of Kentucky’s largest private university,
Al Sullivan has spent his entire professional life in the field
of career education. He founded Sullivan Business College, a
one-year business school, with his father in 1962. That first
year, the school had five teachers and seven students. Today,
Sullivan University System is one of Louisville’s fastest-growing
businesses and has more than 6,000 students. The school has
also grown to three campuses, in Louisville, Lexington and Fort
Knox. Dr. Sullivan also heads Louisville Technical Institute
and Spencerian College and serves on numerous local and national
boards and committees, including Greater Louisville Inc. He
is the father of two adult children, Glenn Sullivan and Lisa
Likins, both of whom are employed in the Sullivan University
System.
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Ed Lane: In 1962, you founded Sullivan University (formerly Sullivan
Business College). Upon opening, the school had five teachers and seven
students. How many students are enrolled in Sullivan’s seven campus
locations this fall?
Al Sullivan: We’re expecting
about 6,200 students this quarter, which will be about a 10 percent
increase over last year.
As any private college or
university, you’re at the mercy of your students to sign on the
dot. Students have to make a decision every term to re-up and come
back. So every twelve weeks, in our case, all the students disappear
after finals. They can take their tuition money and financial aid
and go anyplace they want. So, it’s always a validation when
more and more students choose to come here every year. That makes
me feel pretty good.
EL: Forty years ago, when
you opened the first location, what was the entrepreneurial business
plan you conceived for your start-up business college?
AS: My family had been in
private education in Kentucky since 1926. My father and I previously
had owned Spencerian College (formerly Spencerian Commercial School),
which we sold in 1961. Using my dad’s years of experience and
my enthusiasm – I was a young pup, freshly out of the University
of Kentucky – we made the decision to start a one-year business
school, with the magnificent goal of having 150 students. We went
from seven to close to 150 students by the beginning of the first
fall term.
My main job was to recruit
students that didn’t know that Sullivan Business School even
existed. From that point, we continued to look for opportunities to
serve the business, medical, engineering, legal and hospitality communities.
By adding programs that filled the needs of employers who had good
growth potential, we were also creating great opportunities for our
graduates to get good jobs.
EL: Would you say that your
business plan today mirrors what it was in the beginning, except it’s
been expanded to different areas?
AS: Yes, but the scope of
the Sullivan System is greater. Sullivan is a regionally accredited
university with a graduate school and educational programs offered
worldwide. Our students are from all across the world. Spencerian
College has almost doubled its enrollment over the last two years
by expanding the medical programs it offers on its main campus in
Louisville.
EL: What is the difference
between Sullivan University and Spencerian College?
AS: The Sullivan University
System has three separate institutions. Sullivan University, which
has evolved into a highly specialized four-year private university
and the largest in Kentucky, by far. Spencerian College and the Louisville
Technical Institute are two-year institutions. Both grant associate
degrees, and they are career-focused.
EL: With three schools and
seven campuses, how do you manage operations?
AS: Sullivan provides the
typical board of education functions – legal, accounting, data
processing, facilities management, financial aid, purchasing, advertising,
public relations, graphic design, housing, and so forth. The administrative
staff is around 40 people who work at our main campus in Louisville
and provide these services for all seven campuses.
EL: Can you say approximately
what type of annual budget you have to run your operations?
AS: No. But Business First
sent me a letter today announcing that Sullivan is in the “Fast
50,” which is comprised of the 50 fastest-growing privately-owned
companies in Louisville.
Sullivan has about 900 employees
and 6,000-plus students and has been around for a long time. Our growth
rate shouldn’t be matching that of a small entrepreneurial company
with 15 employees that grows 100 percent, from one million to two
million in a year. So we’re always surprised to make the “Fast
50” list.
EL: To what do you attribute
Sullivan’s continued growth?
AS: Sullivan is focused on
high-need vocations that pay well. Our educational programs are in
fields where our graduates can get top jobs. We’ve been above
98 percent in graduate employment success for the last 17 years.
The two questions our students
ask are, “Can I afford it?” and, “What’s in it
for me if I come to your school?” Sullivan publishes a 10-year
record of all of the graduates of our schools by course. For every
course we offer, we can show how successful the graduates were in
accepting employment related to their education.
EL: Are there any other issues
influencing your success?
AS: Year-round operation.
In the United States, schools have stayed on a system that was originally
based on an agricultural economy and allowed students to go home and
work on the farms in the summer. Now it’s only for the convenience
of the professors and high school teachers who’ve been able to
negotiate a deal that allows them to work for eight or nine months
a year and get paid for twelve. Public schools are now beginning,
because of limited resources, to go year-round. At Sullivan, students
graduate every 12 weeks.
We operate efficiently and
just don’t purchase frivolous things. Our three buildings in
Louisville have 140,000 square feet. The buildings are used seven
days a week, from 7:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night. We have
classes every night, and all day Saturday and Sunday. So we utilize
our facilities.
EL: What other business strategies
have helped Sullivan succeed?
AS: The relevancy of what
we are trying to teach. We are not trying to be everything to everybody.
Centre College would say it’s a “world-class liberal arts
institution.” At Sullivan, we say “we’re a world-class
career institution”. Every program we teach has some relevance
to a good position with a future in a very narrow field.
EL: How have you financed
your expansion?
AS: We have no debt. Although
we’re not endowed, Sullivan does get grants and gifts and we
do have a foundation through which benefactors can contribute. I don’t
spend a significant amount of my time asking people to give me money.
In our case, if we do need money we go to the bank and borrow it.
We’ve been fortunate that we haven’t had to borrow money
recently and we maintain good reserves.
EL: Do you have a lead bank
with whom you have a primary relationship?
AS: National City is our bank
and has been for a long time, although Bank One and others are soliciting
our business every day.
EL: What kind of leader does
it take to run a college?
AS: More and more university
presidents are not academicians but are business managers. Schools
have to have somebody that can manage the enterprise. If you’re
not managing it well, then you’re going to price yourself out
of the marketplace for students and go out of business. Most private
institutions’ endowments aren’t big enough to support a
deficit for very long.
EL: When did Sullivan University
begin to offer post-graduate studies and what’s the rationale for
that program?
AS: Just a normal progression.
As Sullivan had more and more graduates, they said, “Why don’t
you have a graduate school?” So we took a look at the marketplace.
We started with the traditional MBA and we’ve built five or six
concentrations within that area. Everything from finance, IT systems,
marketing, management, human resource management, and dispute resolution
are all concentrations within the MBA. And then we added a very needed
degree, which was a master of science in managing information technology.
EL: What career programs at
Sullivan seem to be attracting the most interest from new students?
AS: At Sullivan University,
certainly the graduate school – there’s been a lot of interest.
Our hospitality programs – culinary, hotel/restaurant management
– continue to grow by leaps and bounds.
At Spencerian, we’ve
doubled the enrollment in the past year. The one-plus-one LPN to RN
program, the radiologic technology program (the Rad-Tech), and the
surgical technology program have all just boomed.
EL: In the cases of these
specialized medical programs, have these programs been started because
students are seeking specific medical training or are these classes
in response to the needs of hospitals and medical providers?
AS: If the word “beg”
would come into the picture, that is a word we might use. University
of Louisville did the strangest thing two years ago: They dropped
their allied health school in the midst of the largest crisis for
allied health personnel in our history.
Sullivan has partnership agreements
with Norton and Jewish (hospitals). They’re providing funding,
equipment, and internship sites, as well as paying tuition for their
staff members to take the programs. We are providing the accreditation.
Probably 65 or 70 of our students receive $8,000 tuition in return
for working for the hospitals so many months after they graduate.
The medical profession and
this critical shortage they have, particularly for nurses, has seen
“partnershipping” go to new levels. Healthcare providers
fully expect it to solve a lot of their short-term and hopefully long-term
human resource issues. We will be expanding this opportunity into
Lexington in the near future.
EL: Do most of your students
select a major when they enroll at Sullivan?
AS: Yes. I think selecting
a major keeps students in school. It also lets them find out quickly
if they have selected the right major. We can put kids in the kitchen
that think they want to be a chef. By doing that, students that get
in those classes and find out they don’t want to stand in front
of a hot stove. So we help them determine their true interests during
first 12 weeks in school rather than waiting around for a year or
so to get through their general studies classes before they have a
cooking class.
EL: Does Sullivan operate
a full time restaurant on site?
AS: We operate three private
food service facilities. We have Winston’s, which is a three-and-a-half
star gourmet restaurant. Across the street, we have a retail/wholesale
bakery and teaching lab for baking and pastry students. And we operate
Julep’s, which is a private catering company.
EL: Do culinary students get
paid to work at Sullivan restaurants?
AS: No – they pay us.
Winston’s is their final quarter in school, on weekends only.
So, they are still taking classes Monday through Thursday and they
work Thursday afternoon, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. They work seven
days a week in their last term. Over 500 of our students are working
in other restaurants and hotels in Louisville as chefs and so forth.
EL: Has Sullivan been able
to affiliate with a few of the national celebrity cooks?
AS: Let’s name a name
that almost everyone knows. Emeril Lagasse is a member of our board,
has been for 10 years, before he was famous. Charlie Trotter was a
member of our board, although he had to resign. Nick Nickolas from
Nick’s Fishmarket in Chicago. We have a variety of people from
the food service industry: Brent Frei, who’s editor of Chef magazine
and a member of our national board; Gerald Fernandez from General
Foods. So we have a big national board.
EL: How long has the culinary
school been in operation?
AS: We started our first class
in ’87 and our first students graduated in ’89.
EL: With regard to placement
of your culinary students, do many of them stay in the Louisville area?
AS: Most of them don’t.
They’re all over the world. We have culinary students from 38
states and seven or eight foreign countries studying with our chefs
right now. I would compare this to a music school bringing in some
world-class musicians.
EL: What new educational programs
are you now developing?
AS: We have affiliated with
Harvard, Pepperdine University, University of Missouri, Georgia State,
Florida International and seven other academic partners with the Federal
Mediation Conciliation Service (FMCS), which is the agency that settles
all the big strikes. And Sullivan has been designated as the official
training site and on-line provider for FMCS, internationally. We’re
by far the smallest institution but they needed somebody that could
move fast. We were sort of laughing the week that Harvard came to
study at Sullivan. Sullivan is providing a FMCS group solution program
to the new merged government in Louisville and would also make it
available to Lexington’s urban government.
EL: Is Sullivan involved with
the UPS Metro College Program?
AS: All the private universities
in Louisville including Sullivan are involved. Our students get the
same benefits, except for housing. Sullivan probably has 35 students
in the program. The program is so successful, UPS may have more students
from all over the state than it can accommodate.
EL: Kentucky and Louisville
have a “brain drain.” Young people are outmigrating from the
state. What do you think would be an effective way to motivate people
to stay?
AS: I don’t know. I’m
on a committee for workforce development and we couldn’t come
up with an answer. It’s going to be a hard problem to solve in
a state that doesn’t have very many prestigious private or public
institutions that attract the top students. So, we’re still losing
those students to out-of-state schools.
EL: Do you think that part
of the problem might be lifestyle issues?
AS: No. Young people say there’s
not enough to do here, but when you ask the young married couple with
children, they say this is the greatest place to raise kids in the
world.
EL: If you were in the new
Louisville mayor’s “kitchen cabinet,” is there a specific
recommendation you would give the mayor?
AS: I have never sat around
the table with the presidents of the other two- and four-year colleges
to discuss what we could do to help Louisville be better, how we could
combine our educational resources. If the new mayor could harness
that juice, there are a lot of things we could do to benefit Louisville.
EL: Considering your long
association with young adults, what changes have you noticed in their
goals, aspirations, and outlook to the future?
AS: Their goals have not changed
much; their social consciousness has. Young adults are a little bit
more selfish than they were years ago. They want to be sure to take
care of themselves. We test our students on personality traits. Test
scores indicate that students are a lot more aggressive.
EL: If you were helping a
young business professional starting their career, what kind of advice
would you give?
AS: If they were just starting
their career, I would look at what’s been happening in the business
world recently. You can’t follow the herd. You have to have ethics;
values you believe in. And if you can’t work for an organization
where those principles are followed, quit and go someplace where you
can. You can do one stupid thing and ruin it forever. So you need
to work very hard, as I’ve tried to do here. Stay the course,
be honest, and give students more than their money’s worth. That’s
always been our philosophy.
Ed G. Lane is chief executive of Lane Consultants Inc. and publisher
of The Lane Report.
edlane@lanereport.com
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