A for-profit school in a modest office park in the shadow of Angel Stadium in Anaheim has quietly grown sixfold in three years—and it has its sights on more.
Kensington College had 44 students in a single paralegal program in 2011.
Bristol University—Kensington’s name after its purchase that year by career educator Patrick Doan—has 267 students in paralegal, hospitality, and bachelor’s and master’s in business administration.
Kensington held classes in a strip mall in Santa Ana. Doan brought on a group of Vietnamese investors in 2012 and moved Bristol to 10,000 square feet in a building tucked between Karcher Environmental Inc. and Anaheim’s fire department training center near the Orange (57) Freeway.
Bristol executives said the school had barely enough room for its student body in Santa Ana. Now it has a library, offers online programs and sports, and plans new degrees, business program emphases—and more sports.
Goals
While many for-profit schools focus on vocational programs—whether entry-level, such as for dental technicians, or licensed professions such as physical therapy—Bristol wants to be a university with graduate degrees and athletic facilities.
The first floor of the building has classrooms, student services and a library. The fourth floor houses Bristol’s offices—at the end of the hall, past the chiropractor and a law firm.
Executives said their eventual goal for Bristol is a campus of its own.
“We are passionate about education,” said Khanh Phan, director of corporate affairs. “We’ve seen how it changes people’s lives.”
Including her own.
Phan said she “worked 10 years in Vietnam” to afford one year of graduate study to earn her master’s degree in Europe. She teamed up with Nguyen Nguyen—a fellow native of Vietnam—who worked as a consultant to American companies as their country was opening its socialist economy to market forces.
The two started a school near Hanoi in 2005 called International American University.
The school failed, but Phan and Nguyen took their idea to the U.S. some years later, after the recession had washed out a number of small for-profit schools here.
“Schools were closing,” Nguyen said. “So there was an opportunity.”
Kensington was accredited and had been founded in 1991 by an attorney named Barbara Quigley who wanted to sell it and instead focus on teaching. She still teaches in the paralegal program at Bristol.
The new owners bought the school, moved it to Anaheim, added programs, and hired its first president, Gene Raltz.
It held its first graduation as a university in November; 80 students received degrees.
The shift to full-fledged university status continues.
While 71 of the 80 graduates were in paralegal or hospitality programs, 10 of 267 current students are in them. The others are in business administration—and Bristol plans to expand its higher-level degrees.
Bristol said it will retain the shorter and vocational paralegal and hospitality operations training—though degreed programs will be its focus.
Nguyen and Phan said the school has begun to consider bachelor’s degrees in communication and in information technology; master’s degrees in education and in public administration; and new emphases for business administration programs.
Bristol’s buyers had been involved in education for a long time and had a strong personal desire to invest in it, the school said.
They keep tuition down to “build a university and run it at the lowest cost and education affordable,” Bristol said.
“Why should education be expensive?” Phan said.
Tuition in the business program is $395 per unit for undergraduate work and $595 per unit for the graduate degree. A two-year associate degree costs about $24,000, a four-year bachelor’s is about $47,000, and an MBA is $21,420.
Undergraduate students take four four-week courses, while MBA students take two eight-week courses in a 16-week semester.
Bristol’s programs are accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools in Washington, D.C.
Students
Nguyen said several factors work in its favor, including its location—with Orange County centrally located in Southern California and the school itself in the center of Orange County. Bristol draws heavily from the pool of middle- to upper-class Asian-Americans here and gets a significant portion of its students from overseas.
Some 43% of all its students come from Vietnam—most are in the MBA program. Another 21% are African-American, and 15% are Latino-American.
Vuong Hai Nam, a consul general of Vietnam, attended Bristol’s graduation last month.
Nguyen said Bristol aims to differentiate its business offerings—avoiding what he called the “monotone” of a marketing emphasis but something in information technology or other newer areas—as well as its sports programs.
“American sports are extremely popular,” he said.
He expects Bristol’s athletic programs to bring positive attention to the school from prospective students and supporters.
Bristol offers five sports: men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, track and field, and soccer.
Nguyen and Phan said the basketball teams acquitted themselves well in this, their first season.
