Is it just me or has there been a full court press in TV advertising of private paid universities right now, Keller, Phoenix, et. al. from what I understand they basically charge a small fortune for a worthless degree, which will not guarantee employment at the end of it. Is this not a scam? Are these institutions not just sucking people into paying hundreds of thousands for a degree that will be considered worthless in the end? Why are there no regulations stopping this scam?

New semesters starting this month.

It's not like a college degree from anywhere guarantees employment these days.

I also wouldn't call Phoenix worthless. They are accredited. I know they do a lot of work with the military, and they've got on base campuses at a number of bases.

Maybe not worthless, but ask the HR department of any Fortune 500 company how much value they give a University of Phoenix degree, and they'll tell you it's all but zero.

Of course, our favourite political scientist might disagree with this. After all, he taught there almost as long as he taught at one of his other "top tier schools."

There's one commercial I need to have explained. From Keller. The woman who gets in the elevator with some kind of a scarf around hr neck and then begins a cain-smile. WTF is she smiling about? Why does that smile announce to me that she's just pulled one over on someone else?

Here in California a number of graduates of Taft-like law skools have sued those skools for their tuitions back, based on fraud in the inducement. They've won their suits (does that mean they're good lawyers?) and the law skools now have to post that going to law skool, getting a J.D. and even passing the bar is not enough to guarantee that they will be able to practice law!

It is the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central regional association that accredits the programs of the University of Phoenix. That "accreditation" enables University of Phoenix to participate in the student loan programs of the Department of Education. It does not mean much else. The problem lies with the Department of Education and the Higher Learning Commission, which now "accredits" most online or correspondence school colleges.

The University of Phoenix does serve a population that the standard colleges and universities have not yet learned to serve well: people who are several or more years out of high school (or GED), who have full-time jobs, who very often have served in the military, who have families, and who would find it difficult or impossible to take four years out of their lives to earn a conventional degree. Many of them are quite bright and talented. I do my bit to serve their needs by teaching my classes only at night, when many such students can take the time for a conventional college course. Some of them have been outright pleasures to teach. I think our mainline colleges and universities need to figure out how to serve them better, and I don't believe that "distance learning" is the answer. Ideally, our classrooms should be used from 7 AM to 10 PM; instead classes are concentrated in prime time, 9 AM to 3 PM, leading to considerable waste of classroom resources. Most current faculty members would rise up with pitchforks and burning faggots (proper use) if required to teach at those "off" hours, but almost all of my graduate school classes were taught at night in the 1960s.

Incidentally, teaching evening classes in a New England winter can sometimes be quite a feat. I keep an emergency supply of canned foods and water in my office for the night that I cannot make it home. Sardines keep forever, don't they? The real problem is that I have no perceptible ability to turn one sardine into hundreds and one saltine into thousands, so I could not feed the entire class if we were all snowed in. I think/hope the U keeps MRE's for such an occasion.

Part of it is New Year's Resolution Season. There's also quite a few diet product commercials running. I think. Because I TIVO.

That's ME!!! 10 years of night school for my undergrad. Professors who teach nights are my heroes. You literally change lives.



Bunker Hill Community College has been experimenting with late-night classes. 11:45 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. They started with 2, now they are up to 5. They also offer free coffee.



Your college is out in the boonies, IIRC. Here in urban Belize if the T is running, I can get home. I've never been stranded.

I don't get it either! She's the one they call "the three trains and a bus rider". I guess that's telling us she works hard, goes the extra mile. See, she reads her Keller textbook hanging on the bus strap. But then she gets in the elevator, presumably after she's got a great job because of her hard work and Keller education, and grins like she's pulled a fast one. Every time I see it, I hone in on that scarf and think, ooo, that's too tight, I'd never tie something around that part of my neck. Ick.

We should have a thread about commercials!

It's interesting how a New Year's resolution to not snack after dinner makes you notice how many food commercials there are during evening TV time. Last night I saw these three commercials in a row: talking Doritos bag, farmer dude who sells his taters to McDonald's,(of course they show a glamour shot of the golden, nummy fries), then Meijer brand ruffle-cut potato chips. Shove some more corn and potatoes down your gullets, America!

Also too, weightwatchers, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig ads. ( A poor girl's Nutrisystem is when Lean Cuisines are 5 for $10 at the Kroger! )

There has been a big lobbying effort by for profit colleges, as some legislators want to crack down on their promises else lose the financial aid money of students.

I think the lobbyists won.

frontline:
How the For-Profit College Industry Took on the Obama Administration (and Won)
Follow @GretchenMargDecember 12, 2011,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... n-and-won/


It seems the CEO's of these schools are making millions, but the students often don't get much for their money.



http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011 ... -colleges/


http://chronicle.com/article/Demographi ... in/130040/


It looks like the same legislators who want to abolish tenure at universities and fire high school teachers are the ones who are fighting regulation of for profit schools.

They want to dismantle the public schools system in this country period, from K-PhD.

I love online learning. I've taken several classes online from UCLA Extension. One's classmates are in England, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, California, Belize, NYC. The best part is all the extension classes are taught by professionals working in the discipline. I took two Systems Analysis classes in person, taught by an honest to dog IT professional, then two online, and for a couple of years a couple of writing classes per semester online, taught by working writers.

I understand that in these tough times Universities see online classes as an important revenue stream that partly makes up for lower enrollment and as such they aren't likely to be completely honest in their assessment of talent or assignment of grades...after all, they want everyone to come back and spend more money for which the university doesn't have to go to much effort or expense...but so what? I can't drive two hours at night now to take a two hour class in person and I have gotten so much out of it.

I agree that online classes fill a need. I do think they should be honest in advertising.



http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-05 ... estigators




http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-05 ... e-business


With the internet, video, skype-type services, online instruction can be done well.

But something should be done about deceptive practices by those who would take your money and provide little in return.

For free classes that can lead to a good online education ....

Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org -- My brother introduced me to this, and all I can say is that Sal is awesome. My brother used it to master linear algebra. I'm using it to re-learn some physics and calculus.

MIT Open Courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu -- MIT is opening all its classes, and many of these also have the lectures in video and audio. All are free. I read recently that MIT is working on a program that would allow people who have used their Open Courseware for study to get some sort of certifcation that they have learned it.

Academic Earth: http://academicearth.org -- Video courses from Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, MIT ... I love this site, but wish the videos worked on the iPad. What I do is find a course I like, and then find its source at the school or in iTunes.

http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses -- just found this, so I haven't checked it out much yet.

iTunes U!!! It's in your iTunes on your computer (or your iPad). I don't know if this started it, but it was where my eyes were opened.When iTunes U launched, I began with Thomas Sheehan's awesome course on Historical Jesus from Stanford, and truly enjoyed it. I wrote to Professor Sheehan to thank him (and to let him know that he had appreciative students that he's never seen), and he wrote back with more material and suggestions -- more personal guidance from the professor than I had gotten in some of my college courses. Stanford has some really good computer science courses, too, and lots more.

Now, what we do need is some nationally recognized certifications, like O-levels and A-levels, so that those HR people who can hire someone who doesn't have a piece of paper that says BS but who really is educated (and motivated).

I had an engineering draftsman working with me that went the ITT tech route, an he was quite good, but the education he got for some $20k was about on par with what he could have gotten for $10k at a community or junior college, and had an AS degree probably a bit more 'respected' by HR departments.

There is a union concern about mainline universities offering courses online. The MIT Open Courseware program has some excellent modules. What, then, is to prevent an ordinary bricks-and-mortar university administration from deciding that it could lower its costs by reducing the need for classrooms, dormitories, and faculty (with their benefits packages and annoying habit of thinking that they have a role in the university) if a superb course could be picked from the MIT Catalog and offered for that ordinary university's credit? At best, this would reduce that university's faculty to being teaching assistants. It somewhat reminds me of an American history course that I took in the 1960s that was taught by the talking head of Arthur Schlesinger on videotape. The live academic in the room was a Teaching Assistant. Admittedly, this course had no multimedia capabilities and did not even use images. It was just spoken words with no opportunity for questions. The TA was not up to the task of speaking on behalf of Schlesinger.

I believe that face-to-face education has something going for it that distance education can never have. I can readily imagine Orly being unable to cope with a class taught by the Socratic method or any other variant of the Langdell Hall method. Being on the spot for an entire class period would have done her in, and we might have been spared Dr. Orly Taitz, ESQ. I recognize that some faculty members fail to take advantage of that and might as well be talking heads piped in from MIT.

In an experiment that we conducted here, students strongly expressed their preference for face-to-face education. We offered a single class in two sections, one face-to-face and one online. After enrolling in the class, students were randomly given one of two permission numbers, one for the face-to-face section and the other for the online section. Overwhelmingly, students who drew the online permission numbers chose to drop the class and register for a guaranteed face-to-face class. Enrollment in the online section was very sparse. Not all of the students involved in the experiment were residential students, although being here in the boonies, we are overwhelmingly a residential university.

It is not just job security, salaries, and benefits that concern faculty about distance education. It is that when an administration chooses to go the distance education route, there is a serious risk that faculty governance of the curriculum will be eroded. That did happen here for a few years, when a newly-established College of Continuing Studies tried on its own motion to offer courses accredited to the various departments and schools, choosing their own instructors. The plan was to compensate the departments and schools for their presumed loss of students by providing them the equivalent of an Adjunct's salary.

AFAIK, that plan got nowhere with any department or school. It made no sense for them. That College no longer exists. What does exist is a Center for Continuing Studies that offers off-brand degrees, such as the Bachelor of Professional Studies Degree Program (BPS). There are Bachelor of Professional Studies degrees in Occupational Safety and Health, Organizational Studies, and Web Technology. All of these programs have ordinary degrees offered in the schools and colleges.

It also offers the Bachelor of General Studies Degree Program (BGS), which serves as a side entrance for many students. Many BGS students enroll in an ordinary school or college as soon as they are able to do so, having proved their admissibility by their performance for the BGS (they take the same courses as do admitted students). They are often excellent "adult learners." Some are remarkably adult (I love having students with five or six decades of experience), while some of the ones who I most admire are people returning from military service. Many of the latter hold the GED, which can be a strike against an applicant (no GPA).

The advanced degrees are Master of Professional Studies degrees in Homeland Security Leadership (HSL), Human Resource Management (HRM), and Humanitarian Services Administration (HSA). Of course, the Business School offers a degree specializing in human resources, and the Social Work school offers a degree specializing in social welfare services. The HSL degree exists solely because DHS pays for it. The Provost tried to "shop" it to some school or department that could fit it in, but nobody wanted it. I do not sleep more peacefully at night knowing that the security of the homeland (what a Nazi concept!) is partially guarded by people who have never seen a member of the faculty in person. In fact, it is quite unclear that our security precautions are sufficient to prevent a "ringer" from taking every single test that the supposed student "took." This has also happened with standard admissions tests such as the SAT, MCAT, LSAT, etc., and it is uncertain whether every cheater has been caught. In fact, we have our own questions about Orly's bar exam.

My daughter recently graduated from Temple University with a biology degree. She hopes to go to veterinary school and was researching what different schools required in undergraduate classes.

Several vet school apparently have a preference (or requirement) for students having taken an animal nutrition class, but Temple didn't offer it and it isn't a widely available undergrad class. She found two schools which offered it online - Purdue and Rutgers. Purdue was cheaper but required exams to be proctored by a non-relative/non-employer. Rutgers offers the class entirely online, including exams.

I offered one of my co-workers as a proctor since it would be a significant cost savings. But she had already spoken with the Rutgers professor about the class and really liked her (apparently she was very responsive to my daughter's email questions about the class). She was also worried about scheduling the exams during business hours at my office, since she is working full-time in a vet's office while taking the class. I did appreciate Purdue's proctor requirement as helping to verify who is really taking the exam.

The class is starting soon so I will have to ask her about her experiences taking an online class - it will be her first one. Luckily she is pretty disciplined and driven to both learn and get good grades to get into vet school. I don't know if I would have the discipline for an online course - I always liked the structure of going to class.

I did warn her to look at "real" schools offering the course she needed, since I didn't want her taking a course that wouldn't be acceptable to a vet school. But I don't think animal nutrition is a popular course at most for-profit schools

I know home schoolers who take this route. Or they start by taking a few classes then transfer to regular programs after a few terms -- depends on the university.

I like the CLEP, where you can take an exam to determine how far your life experience /prior education will get you in college. Do people still do this? I don't hear about it much anymore.

We have many students who are admitted with college credits earned in their high schools and even more students who take CLEP tests or something like them for college credits. Many Storrs regional high school students may enroll in 1st-year college courses offered half a block away. A result is that we increasingly have really talented students who in their first semester on any college campus are already sophomores. It can cut a year off the standard B.A. education; it does less for the standard B.S. education.

We have been pressured to authorize the granting of college credit for an intro sociology course to be taught in high school. Our department would have to supervise those courses, including reviewing syllabi and teacher qualifications. I and many others consider that sociology is not an appropriate course for high-schoolers. In the original sense of the word, it is a deeply radical discipline, and not many high schoolers have the intellectual or moral maturity to examine what they have long been taught to think is true. My frosh white students routinely come in from the white suburbs where such courses would be taught with, for example, the GOP meme that most recipients of "welfare" are Black, and that most Blacks are on welfare.

The achievement gap between Connecticut's suburban schools and city schools is the largest in the nation, meaning that the city schools need to concentrate on the basics and could not offer such a course. Unfortunately, my exams and nationwide experience both confirm that many city minority students come to the University with exactly the GOP set of beliefs. They persist in those beliefs no matter how many charts and graphs I or the textbook show them. I believe that such negative indoctrination is a major cause of failure to apply for college.