From Community Benefit to Rent-Seeking Scam: UC Irvine's Division of Continuing Education (Guest Post)

 

510 E. Peltason Dr, UC Irvine  

by Trevor Griffey, School of Humanities, UC Irvine

The idea of continuing education— sometimes also called “lifelong learning”— is old and venerable. It taps into some of the best humanist ideals of self-improvement and the democratization of access to skills and knowledge.

But the management of contemporary continuing education programs by many universities has shown the perils of for-profit models for education hosted by supposedly non-profit and even public universities.

The expectation that extension programs be self-supporting has provided cover for the development of rent-seeking continuing education programs that spend a tiny fraction of the fees they collect on education. The notion that research faculty need not attend the management of extension courses has provided cover for administrators to remove continuing education from the purview of shared governance, thereby allowing administrators to exploit teachers and over-charge students to build inefficient and parasitical bureaucracies with little effective oversight.

The case of the Division of Continuing Education (DCE) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) provides a sensational example of the dangers of leaving extension programs unregulated. The mismanagement at Irvine is arguably so egregious that DCE should be abolished. And UCI’s example should provide inspiration for audits of other extension programs— at UCs, across the US and around the world.

Signs of Trouble in 2025: “Hunger Games-Style” Layoffs at UCI’s DCE

In 2025, angry posts from insiders in UCI’s Division of Continuing Education started appearing on the reddit thread for UCI, r/UCI. 

A user calling themselves “mincho94” sounded the alarm when they posted the following announcement:

 

Resentment among recently laid off staff carried over into personal attacks on DCE Dean Kristine Collins, who UCI hired three years earlier to serve as Dean after serving as “vice president of University Partnerships at Circuit Stream Inc., a virtual-reality education startup focused on delivering online courses in partnership with North American universities.” These attacks included allegations of favoritism and creating an extremely unprofessional workplace environment. 

The anonymous poster, mincho94, went on to allege that: 

 

A different anonymous account, No-Water6828, added to the criticism of Dean Collins, posting that she had celebrated “break[ing] things” and “mak[ing] maverick moves” on LinkedIn after announcing the mass layoffs in her unit. 

Another anonymous post, this time by SomePassion2428, alleged a “overtly inappropriate relationship Dean Collins had exhibited with both Chief of Staff Liz Larson and HR specialist Matt Aguirre, the three who led and championed the unceremonious culling of the 42 employees within one morning.” In an effort to demonstrate this “inappropriate relationship”, which sounded like friendship, the post included a copy of a supposed “public Facebook profile picture posted on March 3, 2025, Liz Larson posted a photo of herself, along with Dean Collins and Matt Aguirre, poolside in matching, customized bathing suits… In this public photo, Liz is on the left, Krissy second from right and Matt on the far right. Liz’s face is on all of their bathing suits.”

 

Why Did UCI’s DCE Eliminate 35 Jobs?

 

The anonymous posts about the red wedding at UCI’s DCE expressed predictable outrage at the severity of the cuts and the humiliation of the process, and channeled employee anger into questioning the Dean’s professionalism as a manager and ethics as a human being. 

But if the former employees had posted budget data about DCE, they might have had more success in exposing a related scandal: the supposedly self-supporting program lost millions of dollars during the 2024-25 school year. 

After bringing in $25 million in student fees in FY 2023 and 2024 each, UCI’s DCE planned to earn $29 million in FY 2025, but instead saw its revenues drop to just $21.6 million in FY 2025. 

This marked FY 2025 as— at least!— the third year in a row that DCE had lost money. It lost $8,900 in FY 2023, $67,500 in FY 2024, and somewhere between $3-5 million in FY 2025 (more than it spent on instruction!). If these losses were covered by core funds, that means student tuition and state government subsidies were being misdirected into continuing education. 

It gets worse. 

DCE’s enormous losses last year weren’t for lack of cutting corners on instructional costs. In the 2024-25 school year, DCE took in $23.7 million in student fees, and spent a measly $2.7 million, on temporary, low-wage instructors without job security or health benefits to teach their courses. DCE spent 10% of student tuition and fees on instruction and still found a way to lose money.

 

Faculty around the world have complained about what is sometimes called “administrative bloat”, when hiring of managers and administrators outpaces the hiring of faculty and support staff. But this level of predation upon students and proliferation of staff seems to more resemble a parasite taking over its host. 

And it gets even worse. 

Revenue projections provided to DCE by the UCI Division of Finance for budget planning purposes reveal that DCE was carrying $12 million in negative reserves (ie debt to the central campus) when Dean Collins was hired, and by the end of 2024-25 that had grown by at least 17% in the last three years combined. DCE’s $13.9 million in negative reserves is more than UCI allocates every year to provide lower division undergraduate writing instruction.

 

 

Finally, it’s worth noting that DCE is located in one of the nicest buildings on the UC Irvine campus: 510 E. Peltason Drive, a 76,000 square foot, four-story building with “23 classrooms for up to 770 students”, “office space for 200 staff members”, and “3,000 square-foot ballroom, international teacher space and an audio/video studio.” Opened in 2016, the building cost $39 million.   (See top image. Source: LMN Architects.      

What Should Be Done?

The world of unregulated certificates is already questionable. 

Seven years ago, Kevin Carey exposed how US universities were partnering with for-profit corporations to expand their continuing education programs online in ways that monetized their schools’ reputations and steered most student fees to the corporations. Students would pay exorbitantly high prices, 60 percent of which would go to the corporations, and 40 percent of which would go to the schools. The high prices reduced access to online education, and/ or forced students into unnecessary debt they might not ever be able to pay off. The profiteering reduced incentives to hire qualified teachers, pay them living wages and give them reasonable courseloads. And the use of institutions’ names on inferior educational services undermined the job market competitiveness of graduates of the schools’ degree programs.

That UCI is losing money in this enterprise is even more problematic— even if it’s possible that some of these losses came from drop offs in enrollment in DCE’s programs for international students in the Trump era.

One could say that DCE’s recent layoffs, however insensitive and possibly sadistic the layoff process was, might help eliminate DCE’s budget deficits. But attempts to recoup $14 million in losses are going to weigh heavy on the unit for years to come. The incentive to further contribute to a race to the bottom of educational quality, and perhaps divert more than 90% of student fees to something other than instruction, is there so long as the debt hasn’t been repaid to central administration. 

As an alternative to re-doubling its efforts, maybe instead UC Irvine should cut its losses and simply get out of the business of engaging in public-private partnerships to sell overpriced courses in various certificate programs taught by low wage temps? Wipe the debt off the ledger using the more than $800 million in core reserves that UCI currently has, and don’t succumb to further debasement of our school’s educational mission. And as a form of reparations, provide use of DCE to the schools that serve as the backbone for UCI’s teaching mission.

Whether that happens or not, the first step clearly is for the UCI Academic Senate to demand curricular and financial oversight over all instruction done by UCI, and not just the instruction done for degree programs. Academic Senates on other college campuses also need to evaluate the quality and costs of their “self-supporting” units.