Schiller International University is an overpriced for-profit rip-off university

Discussion in 'Business and MBA degrees' started by Daniel Montserrat, Aug 22, 2016.

Loading...
  1. Daniel Montserrat

    Daniel Montserrat New Member

    I attended Schiller International University and it was the biggest scam. They would accept anybody would was able to pay the tuition. This included students who couldn't even speak English. The academics were an absolute joke. I literally had more challenging classes in high school than what I had as a grad student. I would warn anybody who is considering this school to be careful. They will take your money, but they won't provide much of anything in return except a degree with dubious accreditation.
     
  2. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I can't understand why there would be a problem.. After all they're accredited by ACICS. :sad:
     
  3. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

    There are so many excellent American universities, I can't understand why anyone will enrolled at Schiller.
     
  4. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Come on, don't be coy -- how do you really feel about Schiller?
     
  5. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    There are a lot of people who would have stayed clear of an ACICS school before ACICS was in such hot water. When you choose a non-RA school you pretty much have to accept the risk that goes with it.

    My NA Masters has served me well. But I'm also aware there are limitations. I went into it with eyes wide open. Now I'm working on an RA Masters because I feel like that will put those limitations to rest.

    Sucks that you had a bad experience. But I'm not sure what you really expected from a for-profit NA school?

    Also, as someone who has taken grad courses at a bunch of universities, I can say that I was at first surprised by how those courses werent "hard." My high school had a thesis requirement for junior and senior year. You had to crank out two theses to graduate. The papers I wrote as an undergrad were easy by comparison. And even as a grad student I haven't yet had to do anything to that level (of course, I've never prepared a masters thesis). So does that mean that WNMU, Syracuse, LeMoyne, Hebrew College, Moody and a bunch of others are all scams?

    As for accepting anyone who pays the tuition I think you'll find that there are many schools doing the same thing. At a recent career day I was talking with an admissions person (whom I have known for years). And he was talking very freely about people getting accepted. I asked him about the school's published acceptance rate of 42% in USNWR. He shrugged and said "Yeah, we made that number up." Schools have no problem lying to USNWR, apparently.

    The crookedness isn't limited to NA schools or for-profit schools.
     
  6. FTFaculty

    FTFaculty Well-Known Member

    My wife studied the hard sciences in grad school at a Pac 12 university, took a PhD-level course in which there were no homework assignments, no exams, no attendance policy and everyone got an "A". That easy enough for you?

    Acceptance rates should be taken with the same veracity as a world in which publicly-traded corporations were allowed to present their financial statements without independent audit reports--with a major grain of salt. Universities play extraordinary games with the numbers, even, so I have heard through the grapevine, rejecting top flight students whom they'd love to have matriculate if they had reason to suspect said student was going to accept an offer from another institution. Anything to manipulate the numbers. Very little integrity in those numbers.
     
  7. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 24, 2016
  8. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    When I think "risk" I think of it in terms of getting a degree from a diploma mill since that's always a ticking time bomb. In the case of getting an NA degree, it's a matter of possible utility limitation as you've pointed out:

    ---

    Being for-profit and NA doesn't = low quality. ACICS schools are certainly under well-deserved scrutiny, but there are better operating NA accreditors in a better position like the DEAC where you earned a Masters (then DETC) that has served you well. ACICS simply got too big for its britches, too many schools, too small of an infrastructure to maintain proper oversight. That approach was unsustainable, but it appears they ignored that in favor of the amount of money that could be made from it.
     
  9. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Well, it depends. Not everyone understands RA/NA. The limitation in utility could very easily translate into a false accusation of a diploma mill degree. While diploma mills are often seen as a "ticking time bomb" the fact is that I, and others here, have witnessed employers not caring about a diploma mill degree.

    You point out that it was purchased and not earned and they get defensive on the person's behalf. Meanwhile there are people who will write off some NA degrees because, if nothing else, the website isn't as slick as some of the frauds.

    I never said that for-profit and NA = low quality. Never said it. Ever. Don't put words in my mouth.

    But it's unreasonable to assume that an NA school is going to be up to the same level of rigor as a top tier program. Many aren't as rigorous as unranked RA programs let alone any school with a positive reputation.

    So what, you sign up for Schiller and expect, what? That you're going to get the same education that you would get at Wharton but for a fraction of the cost? That's not the same as "low quality" per se. Because it doesn't mean that Schiller, or any other NA school, is putting out an inferior product. But their product is also not designed to compete with a program staffed with top faculty recruited from the finest research institutions. So what do you expect?

    I have an MSM from UMT which is both for-profit and NA. I had an OK experience. The fact that J. Davidson Frame is the Dean was a major selling point. The guy was one of the designers of the PMP program and the development of PMI. So I think his school would have an interesting thing or two to say on the topic of Project Management.

    But is a UMT MBA equivalent or equal to an MBA from Penn State, UPenn or any number of other known schools? Not even close. I'd say it compares to Patten and New Charter, though. And I'd definitely stack it up against Chadron State. And yeah, all of those would be on the low end of the educational spectrum in terms of rigor, faculty qualifications etc.

    But those programs tend to attract working managers who just need to check the box. In many ways they seek to validate existing knowledge and maybe fill in a few gaps than to transform the way a person thinks. For the 55 year old manager who just needs to top off his resume those programs work well. Not so much for the 22 year old who really wants to work at a hedge fund.

    Different educations apply to different situations. It isn't a simple scale of low to high quality in many cases.
     
  10. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    Sure, but that's a different situation. That's a matter of an employer/the public not knowing the difference, and certainly there are lots of people who don't really understand what a diploma mill is and they categorize any school below their personal standard as a diploma mill.

    We've all seen that. But that doesn't make it any less a ticking time bomb since it's all situational anyway. That persons current employer may not care today but even that can change under new management or new company initiatives. Then there is a situation where that persons future employer may care but not know until later and then fire that person, it happens. Usually the only thing that saves a person is exceptional work on the job which is still unfortunate, but from a business standpoint in terms of production/bottom line it's at least understandable though no less questionable.

    And that's just incompetence in which case that employee just dodged a bullet in the long run.


    I'm not doing anything. You said something that sounds an awful lot like NA = low quality, I'm just responding to it.

    Your word choices, not mine. Maybe that's not how you meant it, but that's definitely how it looks to me. Besides, given that most NA schools are for-profit I'm not sure how else you expect people to take that.

    I doubt the average regionally accredited school is up to the same level of rigor as a top tier program. I've attended RA programs that were simpler than high school, and I've attended undergrad NA programs that were rigorous at a level that I thought I was going for a PhD. Every school is different. Accreditation is just oversight to the maintenance of a base uniform standard even with regional accreditation, but after that the quality of schools above that base level will vary regardless of their accreditation.

    Well, I think any person going someplace other than Wharton expecting a Wharton level education is going to be disappointed because Wharton is rather exclusive and brings in the very best educators in the business field + the utility of attending--and hopefully graduating from--Wharton. What school can really compare to that other than schools with rankings close to or above? That's a very small few.

    One should expect quality. One should expect a good education. Whether they get that or not is the question, but being NA or for-profit or both aren't an automatic indication that they won't.

    You may be right. I've seen the Patten faculty list and I think it's staffed with pretty well qualified people, I would say the same for New Charter with the exception of a few from schools that aren't the greatest, but then again most people probably wouldn't be impressed by the schools you or I've attended either.

    In reality, unless you come from a well-known, nobody is really going to be impressed and chances are they've never heard of the school.
     
  11. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    One of my nominations for "worst name change for a DL school".
     
  12. Ted Heiks

    Ted Heiks Moderator and Distinguished Senior Member

    Well, I'm not sure we need a university that's named after the guy that stole Cherokee land.
     
  13. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    One of the things we have seen over the course of the past 10 years is the evolution of National Accreditation as well as the conversation about accreditation in general. DEAC has closed the gap with RA, at least a bit, and the evidence is that we've seen a notable number of RA schools now willing to accept DEAC credits/degrees. We've also seen the creation/development of DEAC doctoral programs (professional doctorates, not PhDs). At the same time we've seen other national accreditors, like ACICS, develop some tarnish and lose some standing, at least among the people who pay attention to these things. Because of these status shifts within the NA ranks it is my own opinion that it's no longer adequate to refer to "National Accreditation" as if it were one thing to be contrasted with Regional Accreditation. ACICS and DEAC are not really the same thing anymore and so probably shouldn't be grouped together as if they were.
     
  14. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I think that's a fair statement. I have always taken issue with referring to the faith based accreditors as NA (as well as those who refer to NYSBOR thusly). RA or the highway...

    unless of course you have a PhD from Rockefeller and are teaching at a top tier research institution.

    Or if you have a DEAC accredited degree that is fully accepted by your public sector employer.

    Or if your employer is completely fine with your degree.

    Personally, I think where the gap will close even more is programmatic accreditation. A DEAC Masters or Bachelor's in, say, nursing is a perfectly viable option if it has the same programmatic accreditation you might look for in an RA school. That is also likely to open up new credit transfer and teaching opportunities for DEAC accredited degree holders than existed previously.

    If ACBSP stopped messing around with unaccredited overseas schools and just opened their doors to some of these NA schools we might suddenly see even more ways for someone with an NA degree to transfer into an RA school.

    My earlier statements weren't intended to convey a statement about quality. They were intended to speak to what a person's expectations were. Higher ed isn't carpentry. You can't just admire the square corners and the dovetail joints and declare it to be "high quality." It's an incredibly subjective measure.

    As it pertains to Schiller I would approach any for-profit school with the general expectation that it likely has a canned curriculum rather than allowing professors to go more free-form. This is becoming more popular among non-profits but it comes right out of the for-profit playbook. And for any NA school I would generally expect something that would likely never fly at an RA school (i.e. unproctored final exam, completely self-paced study, an independent study that would likely never get approved at an RA school etc).

    Accordingly I think a person ought to have reasonable expectations as to what a school will be like. If you walk into Schiller expecting Wharton then you'll be disappointed. If you walk in comparing it to UMT, Patten, New Charter, the community college down the road and the countless private and public universities that aren't even close to having a ranking, I think you probably find it compares much more closely than those latter examples are comfortable with.
     
  15. Daniel Montserrat

    Daniel Montserrat New Member

    Yes, I admit I should have done my homework before I attended that Scam for-profit, Schiller International University. I know all about ACICS now, but I didn't when I first applied and went to that school.
     
  16. Daniel Montserrat

    Daniel Montserrat New Member

    At the European campuses it tends to be a lot of rich kids from all over the world. They really tend not to want a decent education. They just want to party all the time in a European city, and have very easy school work. They don't want to study hard or have to do any real work. And they think that because it is a degree from an American university, it will look good at home in their home country. They don't know anything about how accreditation in the US works. At the campus in Florida it tends to be people using the school just to get a Visa into the US. Schiller must advertise heavily in Pakistan and India, because there are a lot of students from those countries at the Florida campus. It is clear many of them don't care either about getting a decent education because many of them attend class as little as possible, and there is a lot of cheating going on. It is apparent they just use Schiller to get the American visa, and Schiller goes along with this scam because they get their overpriced tuition money.
     
  17. Michigan68

    Michigan68 Active Member

    Daniel,

    I appreciate your honesty in your reaponse. Your education did pay off in respects that you know what not to do and now you know what you would do different to improve. Some people never learn.


    Regards,
    Michael
     
  18. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    It's bad. I thought it was the worst until I heard the name Goucher College (prounounced Gow-chur). Night terrors followed, lol.
     

Share This Page