South Jordan, Utah ? Nadine Whitfield was making $51,000 as an electronics technician for the Postal Service when she decided to try formal computer training to increase her pay.

Her choice: Northface University, a new, for-profit school that aims to graduate legions of software developers with more useful skills than established colleges can provide — in barely half the time.

Northface’s strategy is to pare away liberal arts and focus on a tech-heavy curriculum. The promised result is ready-to-work software designers who won’t cost companies much to train.

Administrators elsewhere, however, question whether such a specific focus will deny Northface students more rounded skills needed for success.

“It sounds like an institution that has identified a need, but will come out with programmers instead of people really trained to think critically,” said Eric Grimson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology administrator.

Firm backing

Northface charges $60,000 tuition for an intensive 28-month bachelor’s degree in computer science. The school is backed by IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and Unisys Corp., which have donated software, development tools and training regimens.

The school’s prime sponsor is IBM, which, like the other sponsors, expects to hire some graduates. IBM wants to counter Microsoft’s market dominance and educate more graduates in IBM-written applications for Linux and other open-source systems.

“I’m jazzed about the Northface program,” said IBM research fellow Grady Booch, a member of the school’s advisory board. “Northface is producing a far better match for the skill sets IBM needs.”

Northface University student Nadine Whitfield concentrates on her project in South Jordan, Utah. Whitfield, who was pictured July 16, chose to attend the for-profit school because of its partnerships with technology firms. The school is dedicated to educating software developers and has attracted the support of IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp.

The school, run by a pair of former venture capital executives and a former technology chief at several companies, is accredited by an organization that certifies trade schools, making its students eligible for federal loans.

But university chairman H. Scott McKinley, a former Asia managing director for Chase Capital Partners, rejects all comparisons to trade schools, saying he has plans to offer a master’s in business administration with a technology bent.

Ambitious plans

The school opened in January and sits in a gleaming new office park on Utah’s Jordan River, south of Salt Lake City. It has enrolled 130 students, with 90 more coming next quarter.

The business plan calls for 1,200 graduates a year by 2007 — five times MIT’s 225 graduates in computer-related fields each year, Northface executives say.

That may seem ambitious, given declining computer-science enrollments. But McKinley says he doesn’t need to achieve that figure for Northface to break even. He expects Northface to turn a profit within a year.

Great Hill Partners, a Boston investment firm, is pledging $15 million for the venture. Matthew Vettel, a principal at the firm, calls Northface a “destination school” for people certain of their career.

“It’s difficult to build an education brand, but when you have a skilled faculty and relevant curriculum, we think the marketplace will support the brand,” Vettel said. The faculty includes Terry Halpin, a former head of database modeling for Microsoft, and Tony Morgan, a Cambridge, Mass.-educated former executive at Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Unisys.

The school recruited Whitfield and others by matching high SAT scores against online registrations for computer games and software programs. After taking out loans and getting a $10,000 scholarship, Whitfield enrolled in January.

For Whitfield, a 30-something who was living in Oakland, Calif., a big selling point was Northface’s partnerships with tech firms.

“It’s a big challenge academically,” Whitfield said. “But I have hands-on experience with people who have expertise in their field. It’s a lot of real-time experience.”

This quarter, Northface offers nearly a dozen technical courses, ranging from algebra review to databases and modeling — and one liberal arts course. The school operates year-round, with only nine days between quarters and a three-week break for Christmas and New Year.

Haym Hirsh, chairman of the computer-science department at Rutgers University, is not a Northface believer. He doesn’t think its intensive focus can inspire the kind of “out-of-box” thinking that goes with a broader education.

Hirsh said he wouldn’t recommend Northface for teenagers graduating from high school.

“It’s all spin for themselves to put themselves on the level of a MIT,” he said. “But I think there is a legitimate need for what they’re doing” — for returning students or career changers.

At MIT, computer-science students also take biology, calculus, physics, chemistry and humanities.

“We believe our students need to have a perspective on the world,” MIT’s Grimson said. “You can’t just go hacking in your room.”