World-Shaker

The Most Important Challenge For Colleges Isn't Price—It's Attention →

infoneer-pulse:

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).

Warning: Profit-Making Colleges Are After You →

Here we go again. Corporations are making money not by producing a product and marketing it, but by loading consumers with loans they cannot pay and then sticking the taxpayers with the bill. Only this time, it’s not houses and mortgages but “higher” education and student loans.

Here’s how it works. Fly-by-night “educational entrepreneurs” — people who run profit-making colleges — buy small liberal arts colleges that are on the verge of collapse because of financial difficulties. This provides the profit-makers with coveted regional accreditation, which is needed to allow their students to take out federal loans. The profit-driven colleges then set up boiler-room style “recruitment” offices to hunt and pressure people to enroll and take out loans, promising them bright futures and successful careers. Former recruitment officers have reported that they were under intense pressure to meet quotas and enroll students, regardless of their readiness for college-level education. Enrollment counselors were told, when on the phone with prospective applicants, to “create a sense of urgency” and “push their hot button,” all tricks typically used to sell penny stocks. (All of this was vividly documented by PBS’s Frontline in an episode entitled “College, Inc.” You can watch it here.)

It’s really messed up that this is legal. In 2009, for-profit University of Phoenix pulled in almost $3.8 billion in revenue, and 86% of it came form the U.S. Department of Education. That’s a lot of Pell Grants and subsidized loans.