The Most Important Challenge For Colleges Isn't Price—It's Attention →
This is one of my favorite anecdotes: Last year, the University of Phoenix enlisted renowned Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen to record a lecture. The university reserved a harbor-view room for Christensen and populated it with young people, so that the camera operators could record their reactions.
Before he began to speak, Christensen noticed that the audience appeared unusually engaged and attractive.
“What school do you guys go to?” he asked.
“We’re not students,” a young man told him. “We’re models.”
When Christensen told me this story, I laughed. But the University of Phoenix is serious — and smart. Putting a Harvard professor in front of a lecture hall filled with models is an acknowledgment that, in a Web-recorded lecture, appearance counts — even the few seconds of cutaways to reactions from gorgeous, engaged “students.”
» via The Atlantic
Sidenote: More proof that the University of Phoenix is pretty skeezy. Fun fact: The University of Phoenix will not hire any of its graduates to teach for them because they’re not an accredited institution (see below for clarification).
Ninja Update: Got an email about my claim that the University of Phoenix is unaccredited. U of P is actually “accredited” by the Higher Learning Commission, which is kind of like saying you’re a doctor because you read a book on anatomy. The Department of Education actually threatened to revoke Higher Learning Commission’s status as an accrediting institution due to the fact that they seem to just throw it at anyone, specifically InterContinental University (http://chronicle.com/article/Inspector-Generals-Warning-to/63206/).
InterContinental University was approved for accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission, University of Phoenix’s accrediting institution, after being rejected by the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges, which accredited well-known diploma mills Duke, UNC and Alabama. </sarcasm>
With as much respect as I can muster on this subject: It’s my opinion that the University of Phoenix is not a credible school, I don’t respect their degrees or “accreditation,” and I would never hire one of their graduates.
PS: To the person who emailed, you never replied to the fact that the University of Phoenix is hiring models to replace students in their recorded lectures (skeezy), or that they don’t hire their own graduates (interesting that they don’t seem to trust the quality of their own degrees).
