A few years ago, universities were dumping their online spinoffs like rotten fish. Now the virtual campus is re-emerging. But the new speculators are public universities, and instead of creating commercial, online branches like their predecessors, they are embracing a not-for-profit model. According to A. Frank Mayadas, president of the Sloan Consortium, a group of colleges that offer instruction online, public institutions are beginning to realize that, with their name recognition and their lower tuition rates, they have an advantage over for-profit competitors like the University of Phoenix, which, with 130,000 students, is the largest of the online institutions. He further added that public universities are "better known" and "they are a better deal."