Peter J. Stokes

Paddles the white water of higher-education data

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By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK

Long before many academics and other organizations began to fully appreciate the ways educational technology and for-profit colleges would shake up the higher-education landscape, Peter J. Stokes and his colleagues at Eduventures were tracking the growth of the companies propelling those trends and their influence on the college market.

Mr. Stokes himself got his first taste of computers as a "disruptive technology" in education during his graduate-school years. The English department at Stony Brook had been given a new computer laboratory, and since few of the professors knew what to do with it, they left it to him and the other teaching assistants to figure out how to use it.

"You really saw the power of technology to bring a certain kind of student into the discussion," he says, recalling how some of the students who wouldn't speak up in class were often quite eloquent when given the chance to participate through online chats.

The lesson stuck with him, even as higher education has continued to be transformed by other forces, such as the rise of international competition for students, the influx of adults on campuses and in online classes, and the declining levels of state financial support for public colleges. He welcomes such changes and the ways they are pushing colleges to alter how they deliver education, market offerings, and manage resources. "When things change, when there is disruption, there is opportunity and there is challenge," he says.

Mr. Stokes's writings have helped put Eduventures on the map as one the few independent research organizations to consider higher education -- together with the industries that serve it -- as a vibrant and sizable part of the national and international economy.

Today the 12-year-old company employs about 40 people, three-fourths of whom work as consultants and researchers. It is known for its reports on trends in education-oriented publishing, on information technology for the school and college markets, and on the growing sector of for-profit education at all educational levels.

Mr. Stokes says his role, and Eduventures', is to help colleges develop common standards and benchmarks so that, for example, a stand-alone continuing-education division can compare itself with one at another institution, rather than to a "distributed" program that is organized more like a marketing arm for the institution as a whole. "You can't identify who's doing something well if you can't say what they're doing, first," he says.

Mr. Stokes deals directly with such issues as manager of one of the company's newer ventures, the Learning Collaborative for Higher Education, a consortium of 40 institutions that share business information about their continuing-education programs. Eduventures also plans to form additional collaboratives to focus on topics like enrollment management and fund raising.

It will also continue its traditional research-driven consulting services, advising colleges on such matters as marketing distance learning or expanding overseas. The college and university portion of the economy "has historically been somewhat soft on metrics," says Mr. Stokes. "Higher education could benefit from applying some business analysis to its core processes."