Troubles Grow for a University Built on ProfitsLet's be frank here, you can't see your academic quality "eroded" when it is rather unclear how well you stood within the academy to start with. They aren't ranked by the leading suspects like US News and World Report, and while many of their programs are accredited, several, including the MBA program, are not. In the article in question, the only quote defending the academic quality at UoP comes from their president:
The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.
But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.
In the interview, Dr. Pepicello shrugged off the bad news. Many top corporations still pay for employees to attend the university, he said, and the exodus of top officials has resulted from a healthy search for new directions. “We are reinventing ourselves,” Dr. Pepicello said.That's not much of a stirring defense, but it's all you'll find.
Simply put, I doubt anyone has a decent sense of what the academic quality there was then or is now. No outside source was quoted in the article speaking up for the university at all with regard to either past or present. Several students were called upon to provide anecdotes, always a useful source of conclusive information, but all we really learn from them is that one professor hired by UoP seems to be "Doctoring" his CV by including a PhD that he never earned.
From the article, it is hard to conclude that the school has really changed all that much. It is an inexpensive option for working adults to get a college degree, which naturally has a low graduation rate because very few students will finish up within the required six-year timeframe if they finish at all. The quality is like what you'd expect from a distributed commuter/online University: highly inconsistent, with little way to really enforce standards. It is what it is, but I'm not sure if this story really did anyone justice.
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5 comments:
It may be that my inner socialist is poking his little head out again.... but I have real reservations about an academic institution whose entire system is based upon profit as its underlying foundation. Online education is a significant, and growing industry. For many people, especially those in the military, its is amazingly beneficial. Columbia college is a small women only liberal arts college here in MO. It has a huge presence in the online education world. Much larger than its local student body. At its heart, it is still a college. It still has the goals of a college. That is important. Education should primarily be a "not for profit" pursuit. Because at the end of the day, if profit is the most important aspect. If the bottom line is more important than the students.... well then its not about education anymore. I don't care if its these so called "charter schools" in the Big Easy, or online education, but education should always be about the student, never about profit. Schools should be debating how to best use windfalls to help their students, not how to best keep their stockholders happy.
the appeal of UoP - is it the cost? Is the tuition lower, or perhaps classes easier for FT workers. I'm just wondering, as clearly the academic prestige has never been one of its strong points. But a degree from a lower-tier school is still better than no degree.
Hey Alex, yep. For-profit schools operate on all sorts of dicey ethical territory, since at the end of the day there is an incentive to not spend the extra money on students and the quality of education. Especially given their quasi-monopoly status in many places, it's hardly a shock that the quality is often terrible.
Alexis- it's the very low cost coupled with the convenience of the onlice courses option. They overwhelmingly aim at night-school type students, who don't have a lot of options in most places. I agree, online education could and should be fine, though the for-profit setup is certainly rather suspicious.
Or to be more blunt, it is aimed at the market that wants a quick degree for initial purposes only. Many schools are accredited in every academic field, yet no one would suggest that all Law Schools are created equal. Yes it caters to the distance learner, but there are a wealth of distance learning programs where you do a residency, and speaking from experience, that is a remarkably intense period followed by months of hard work. But most of those schools, at least the better ones, have one thing in common: they struggle financially. One question that UoP or other corporate universities will never tell, and the one thing I would want to know before kicking over dollar one is what does a professor get paid per student credit hour taught. As an adjunct at the local CC we get paid poorly. At Goddard, I'm certain the faculty in the MFA program get paid worse, and I know how much time they put in because I made them do it with me. But I would bet any of us would be overjoyed to keep our paltry sums rather than accept what UoP pays its faculty. But then again, Goddard and others are trying to survive. Their charters call for education people not making profits. Some of the distance learning programs have been swept up into more "corporate" universities (see the Union Institute) and the faculty I know say that the programs have suffered accordingly. Not only do you get what you pay for, but you get what the faculty is paid for, and at UoP it ain't much.
Hey, lots of real Swedish universities offer online distance studies in English for free! People shouldn't pay for that shit!
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