University of Phoenix was part of a trend that took advantage of the rigid nature of traditional academia and actually customized educational programs around working adults schedule. The problem is they charged outrageous rates for their service.
(The most telling fact in the article is that University of Phoenix still increased their revenue even with this drop)
But with accredited online universities like Western Governors University gaining traction and traditional schools realizing they need adult students University of Phoenix (and others) have lost their unique advantage. Which means a dramatic drop in students.
It may also be a function of the first couple generations of students from UoP finding out their expensive degrees carry fantastically little weight in hiring decisions.
I know several UoP graduates who have found themselves without any additional employability, no improvement in salary and a huge student debt to pay off.
This was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this. For-profit colleges could be a viable venture if they were partly liable for the loans students must take to attend. That would align their profit motives with the success of students and investors.
Right now it's a pyramid scheme about to bust. Banks, and by virtue of lender of last resort, the government end up swallowing this debt.
While this doesn't speak for all its graduates I have met two of their products. One quite young, early thirties, one much older, early sixties. Both had the maturity and view on life of someone, well...who didn't go to university.
Is a degree from university of Phoenix taken serious by employers?
I have a degree from UOP, I was a product of the .com boom in which it was foolish to stay in school, with all the money floating around. To that end, by the time it was all over, I was a career man with a family. Attending a traditional university was out of the question. With family responsibilities and a start-up that had taken off, UOP was really the only option. To be honest, I had low expectations going in, but they where accredited and if I wanted prestige I could do my masters at a better school.
Anyway, I was surprised that the academics where better than that of a community collage, I would put them somewhere between a community collage and a state school. I think they earn their accreditation on the merits of academics, but lets not mince words they are by no means a great school.
Their was one thing at UOP that really was worth the price to me and that is in almost every class, they make you stand in front of the class and give a lecture on the subject. Doing this for over a year made me a very good public speaker. So much so that I started speaking at conferences.
If someone had ever told me that I would be speaking at international conferences, in front of thousands of people, I would have laughed at them, that was just not me. I credit the UOP with providing me with the platform to have all of my awkward, uncomfortable and embarrassing moments on stage in a format that no one cared if you screwed up. For me becoming a public technical speaker was worth every penny, I ever paid to UOP.
Now for most, UOP is a rip-off especially given the economy, but as far as quality of academics, if you would hire someone with a degree from a random state school then you should have no worry about hiring someone with a UOP degree. As with everything it is the applicant not the pedigree.
Is a degree from university of Phoenix taken serious by employers?
Not really. Typically a degree means "this person can start and finish a difficult, multi-year project" even if the school isn't top tier. However, the UoP degrees are of such limited rigor that they are more or less treated as a "certification of hobby" by HR departments -- particularly since it isn't an accredited school it's only one step up from a diploma mill.
A 2-years Associates Degree from an accredited community college carries more weight than a UoP M.S. sadly (for the folks that paid all that money for it).
"Both had the maturity and view on life of someone, well...who didn't go to university"
I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean here. What maturity and "view" would this be? A lack of "getting drunk at the frat house and banging some sorostitutes" stories?
But in all seriousness, I'd like to know what kind of "maturity" and "view" spending 4 years at a constant party would grant someone, that is somehow superior to the ~12 and ~42 years of actual real world experience that the people you cited likely had?
There are three categories of college degrees, when it comes to helping you advance your career:
1. A small set of elite schools: Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech. Having Harvard on your resume will always stand out. "Harvard, huh? Certainly worth a look at what else he/she has done."
2. A school that happens to match with the hiring person -- you happened to attend whatever state school or private college that the hiring person went to or knows well. This is basically nepotism.
3. Everything else. UoP is most likely to end in this bucket.
Phoenix's success and also a source of criticism is due to its liberal admissions policy and therefore it accepts students who might not be considered fully prepared for college level courses by other institutions. People can legitimately come down on both sides of such an enrollment policy, on the one hand, it can be argued that it deprecates the value of a college diploma while on the other it can be argued that the enrollment policy provides access to capable people who would otherwise be denied.
With nearly half a million students and a liberal admissions policy, there are a lot of poor performing students. It is statistically inevitable. But I would suspect that the least prepared students are not much worse than those major US universities admit on athletic scholarship based on their meeting the NCAA's minimum qualifications. Like the major universities, financial gain is the reason Phoenix admits such students.
Like any school, a student's education is dependent on a number of factors. One thing Phoenix deserves credit for is the size of the classes and the emphasis on discussion. Even within mandatory freshman classes, class size is typically twenty students or less and meaningful participation in these discussions is 25-30% of the grade by university policy. Unlike many prestigious public universities, Phoenix doesn't create 200+ student classrooms and does not allow faculty to structure courses in a way which discourages open discussion. In terms of class structure, Phoenix is akin to a small liberal arts college, and that has real educational value.
Technologically, classroom communication uses is entirely disconnected - basically NNTP style newsgroups with a web front end available and most of Phoenix's classrooms are relatively low tech and emphasize reading and writing rather than streaming live video and chat. Importantly, this offers the financial advantage of reduced overhead for the University, and improves access for students with limited bandwidth.
As a publicly traded company, there is no doubt that Phoenix is in the business of selling degrees - but then again, the marketplace also plays a meaningful role in establishing the price of a Harvard degree, and the recent movement into online education by public universities is no less motivated by the bottom line.
While reduction in costs is one reason public universities are moving into online education, the real driver in many cases is increased fees. Online education offers public universities the opportunity to attract more student's from out of state which translates directly into higher tuition. But more tellingly, it is not uncommon for public universities to charge out of state rates to all online students regardless - including those who would qualify for in-state tuition rates on the bricks and mortar campus.
Because Phoenix's online faculty is largely adjunct, they can handle declines in enrollment more readily than their public university based competition, and because they don't try to compete based on cutting edge high bandwidth classrooms, their technology costs are relatively low. That's why they have been able to maintain revenues.
Open admissions and small courses can be found at a community college for a fraction of the price for-profits charge. My main concern about for-profits are reports from their adjuncts that they've been pressured to pass students who perform poorly. A lot of their students also lack basic reading and math skills because for-profits don't have the remediation requirements you would see at a community college.
I'm all for seeing what market forces can do to improve education. But I'm worried that a lot of these students are going into massive debt to get a degree that won't be valued in the marketplace, due to lack of academic standards.
My concern about for-profit education is that its interest is focused more on the investor and less on the student outcomes. Students are admitted fairly easily and loans from for-profit banks in addition to any federal funding create what looks like a ponzi scheme taking advantage of people's aspirations. Once the pool of gullible students are dried up the scheme busts and the tax payers are the ones holding the bag.
Couldn't one say that poor performing students at UoP is a sign that the school's grading and student evaluation is fair (i.e. the system is working) as opposed to rampant grade inflation seen elsewhere?
I've heard some good things about UIUC's online program [1]. My spouse took some graduate level electrical engineering classes at Columbia's online program [2] and had a mixed experience. Some of the classes were really good, but in some cases the adjunct profs weren't very dedicated to teaching; then again, failure to maintain quality control on professional instruction is a problem at lots of reputable schools.
Troy University has an online bachelor's in CS, but the curriculum isn't exactly inspired. It's a mish-mash of good CS stuff with WTF's (such as being forced to take a senior level course on COBOL).
Regis out of CO - http://www.Regis.edu. Check out the college for professional studies. I'm currently doing a combined bachelors / masters in CS, all online. It's spend, but a decent education.
You can get a better education than at any University in the world through self-instruction. But not everyone has such skills, nor does that make it any easier to prove to others that you hold such knowledge.
I wonder how many saw academicearth.com as a viable substitute. It's great for the random "looks interesting" courses, but a diploma, accredited or not, is at least a tangible demonstration of completion.
A source told me there is a law that has been passed preventing sales people to earn a commission from consumers they enroll them into schools. That maybe another reason.
[+] [-] TomOfTTB|15 years ago|reply
(The most telling fact in the article is that University of Phoenix still increased their revenue even with this drop)
But with accredited online universities like Western Governors University gaining traction and traditional schools realizing they need adult students University of Phoenix (and others) have lost their unique advantage. Which means a dramatic drop in students.
[+] [-] bane|15 years ago|reply
I know several UoP graduates who have found themselves without any additional employability, no improvement in salary and a huge student debt to pay off.
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angstrom|15 years ago|reply
Right now it's a pyramid scheme about to bust. Banks, and by virtue of lender of last resort, the government end up swallowing this debt.
[+] [-] arctangent|15 years ago|reply
Some of the individuals represented in the documentary could have come straight out of the Enron documentary.
[+] [-] timurlenk|15 years ago|reply
Is a degree from university of Phoenix taken serious by employers?
[+] [-] kls|15 years ago|reply
Anyway, I was surprised that the academics where better than that of a community collage, I would put them somewhere between a community collage and a state school. I think they earn their accreditation on the merits of academics, but lets not mince words they are by no means a great school.
Their was one thing at UOP that really was worth the price to me and that is in almost every class, they make you stand in front of the class and give a lecture on the subject. Doing this for over a year made me a very good public speaker. So much so that I started speaking at conferences.
If someone had ever told me that I would be speaking at international conferences, in front of thousands of people, I would have laughed at them, that was just not me. I credit the UOP with providing me with the platform to have all of my awkward, uncomfortable and embarrassing moments on stage in a format that no one cared if you screwed up. For me becoming a public technical speaker was worth every penny, I ever paid to UOP.
Now for most, UOP is a rip-off especially given the economy, but as far as quality of academics, if you would hire someone with a degree from a random state school then you should have no worry about hiring someone with a UOP degree. As with everything it is the applicant not the pedigree.
[+] [-] bane|15 years ago|reply
Not really. Typically a degree means "this person can start and finish a difficult, multi-year project" even if the school isn't top tier. However, the UoP degrees are of such limited rigor that they are more or less treated as a "certification of hobby" by HR departments -- particularly since it isn't an accredited school it's only one step up from a diploma mill.
A 2-years Associates Degree from an accredited community college carries more weight than a UoP M.S. sadly (for the folks that paid all that money for it).
[+] [-] julius_geezer|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haploid|15 years ago|reply
I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean here. What maturity and "view" would this be? A lack of "getting drunk at the frat house and banging some sorostitutes" stories?
But in all seriousness, I'd like to know what kind of "maturity" and "view" spending 4 years at a constant party would grant someone, that is somehow superior to the ~12 and ~42 years of actual real world experience that the people you cited likely had?
[+] [-] nodogbite|15 years ago|reply
1. A small set of elite schools: Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech. Having Harvard on your resume will always stand out. "Harvard, huh? Certainly worth a look at what else he/she has done."
2. A school that happens to match with the hiring person -- you happened to attend whatever state school or private college that the hiring person went to or knows well. This is basically nepotism.
3. Everything else. UoP is most likely to end in this bucket.
[+] [-] brudgers|15 years ago|reply
Phoenix's success and also a source of criticism is due to its liberal admissions policy and therefore it accepts students who might not be considered fully prepared for college level courses by other institutions. People can legitimately come down on both sides of such an enrollment policy, on the one hand, it can be argued that it deprecates the value of a college diploma while on the other it can be argued that the enrollment policy provides access to capable people who would otherwise be denied.
With nearly half a million students and a liberal admissions policy, there are a lot of poor performing students. It is statistically inevitable. But I would suspect that the least prepared students are not much worse than those major US universities admit on athletic scholarship based on their meeting the NCAA's minimum qualifications. Like the major universities, financial gain is the reason Phoenix admits such students.
Like any school, a student's education is dependent on a number of factors. One thing Phoenix deserves credit for is the size of the classes and the emphasis on discussion. Even within mandatory freshman classes, class size is typically twenty students or less and meaningful participation in these discussions is 25-30% of the grade by university policy. Unlike many prestigious public universities, Phoenix doesn't create 200+ student classrooms and does not allow faculty to structure courses in a way which discourages open discussion. In terms of class structure, Phoenix is akin to a small liberal arts college, and that has real educational value.
Technologically, classroom communication uses is entirely disconnected - basically NNTP style newsgroups with a web front end available and most of Phoenix's classrooms are relatively low tech and emphasize reading and writing rather than streaming live video and chat. Importantly, this offers the financial advantage of reduced overhead for the University, and improves access for students with limited bandwidth.
As a publicly traded company, there is no doubt that Phoenix is in the business of selling degrees - but then again, the marketplace also plays a meaningful role in establishing the price of a Harvard degree, and the recent movement into online education by public universities is no less motivated by the bottom line.
While reduction in costs is one reason public universities are moving into online education, the real driver in many cases is increased fees. Online education offers public universities the opportunity to attract more student's from out of state which translates directly into higher tuition. But more tellingly, it is not uncommon for public universities to charge out of state rates to all online students regardless - including those who would qualify for in-state tuition rates on the bricks and mortar campus.
Because Phoenix's online faculty is largely adjunct, they can handle declines in enrollment more readily than their public university based competition, and because they don't try to compete based on cutting edge high bandwidth classrooms, their technology costs are relatively low. That's why they have been able to maintain revenues.
[+] [-] danielford|15 years ago|reply
I'm all for seeing what market forces can do to improve education. But I'm worried that a lot of these students are going into massive debt to get a degree that won't be valued in the marketplace, due to lack of academic standards.
[+] [-] angstrom|15 years ago|reply
My concern about for-profit education is that its interest is focused more on the investor and less on the student outcomes. Students are admitted fairly easily and loans from for-profit banks in addition to any federal funding create what looks like a ponzi scheme taking advantage of people's aspirations. Once the pool of gullible students are dried up the scheme busts and the tax payers are the ones holding the bag.
[+] [-] bane|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aonic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelSalib|15 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.online.uillinois.edu/ [2] http://www.cvn.columbia.edu/
[+] [-] jeremymcanally|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexwestholm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firemanx|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] InclinedPlane|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phamilton|15 years ago|reply
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