I just noticed American Intercontental University offering Masters degrees in only 10 months and Bachelors degrees in only 13 months. Hummmm.... Click here to see the AIU promotional. Pretty soon, anybody who wants a Bachelors or a Masters degree is going to be able to get one lickety split, as long as they have the cash. Will the perceived value of the degrees then be lessened??? I seriously doubt that people consider the rigor (or lack thereof) of the various schools that are cranking out these degrees en masse. I'm frankly concerned that the market will eventually become flooded with these types of degrees (though it hasn't happened yet).
I presume these are accelerated, spend-every-waking-moment-on-it time frames? They could also be a bit misleading by claiming 10 months IF one transfers in credits or something - I don't know. I don't really trust marketing statements - truth seems to be extraordinarily flexible in some cases.
And this is 10 months while you work full time. You can get the B.Sc and M.Sc at AIU in two years and the PhD at NCU in 3 year for a total 5 year and all of this while you keep a full time job. So if you are 18, you will be able to teach at the university level at the age of 23 while you work your way out for college tuition. Not at bad deal if you ask me.
I had a look here , and it appears that to actually achieve it in a bachelor's degree in 13 months (in IT) it requires an associates degree to have already been completed. I don't know much else though - it seems rather difficult to find the program rules.
The market is already flooded. Many articles talk about the little value of the MBA nowadays. Most agree that an MBA from a no name school will add little value to your current salary unless it is from a top tier school. The PhD will be the next degree to suffer from the MBA disease. Currently, it is quite common to see PhDs teaching at the community college level or as adjuncts due to the saturation of the market of PhDs. This game will collapse at some point, companies will realize that degrees alone are not enough to judge the competency of an individual and graduate level education will loose value to the point that it would be considered almost next to useless. Students eventually will realize that the market doesn't pay for graduate education so the result will be a drop in the enrollments at the graduate level specially in the for profit schools.
As plantagenet said, the 13 months program is for prospective students that already have associate degrees. I too am concerned about how long it takes to complete a course at all for-profits colleges. On the average, each course at a for-profit college lasts for about 5 weeks. In contrast, each course lasts for 12 weeks at not-for-profit DL schools like Nova Southeastern and other not-for-profit schools.
I'm in a DL program at Nova Southeastern (after trying them ground based) and their promo was that you can complete your MBA in 18 months. In certain circumstances that could be true, but if you don't have a business degree (and I did) they make you take prerequisites which will lengthen the time. If you work full time and raise a family, you may not be able to do a third course, which you would have to do at least one or two semesters to get out in 18 months. Bottom line is, you can get an AIU degree in 10 months but with an incredible amout of pain and sacrifice. I am happy and content to obtain my degree in 24 months and retain my sanity. What's the rush? When I removed the time pressure on myself after the first semester, I enjoyed the learning process more and felt I was retaining more. Nova's got great professors and I like the curriculum. What more do you need?
Re: Re: AIU Masters in 10 months? The traditional (non-accelerated) time for a semester is 15 weeks. 12 weeks would still be accelerated typical of many summer semesters and 5 weeks would be comparable to the mini-courses at the University of Tennessee where students spend 6-8 hours a day in class over the course of 4 weeks. I believe National University offers courses that last 1 month or about 4 weeks. Call me unconvinced. I have taken courses during an accelerated semester (10 weeks) and my professors were always making excuses for things we couldn't cover because of the shortened time span. A 5 week course for a part-time student (someone who can't dedicate 8-10 hours a day towards the subject) seems borderline fraudulent, doesn't it?
I have completed my Bachelors of IT from AIU, you have to have already completed an associate degree to qualify for the 13 month time frame. I had several classmates who had enough credits to gain entry but who had not in fact completed an associate degree and were required to take clep exams for credit or to take equalization courses from AIU. In the case of my brother who is also attending AIU, he was required to complete an associate degree with them before being granted admissions into the bachelors program. So really the time frame of 13 months is misleading, it's an advertising ploy, assuming a 24 month time to complete the associate degree, you're really looking at a total of 37 months. The courses are accelerated, not unlike summer semesters or Saturday courses I took at at the brick and mortar college I completed my AAT degree from. You take one course at a time, and while most working adults cannot spend all day on a weekday, a lot of us do spend all day on the weekend. I typically put in 1.5-2 hours on a weeknight, and depending on the course, sometimes as much as 7-8 hours per day on Saturday and Sunday. It all depends on the class. I have an broad IT background so a lot of the course content is familiar to me already. However, some of the courses, particularly the beginning courses in the bachelors and masters program, were so easy to me that I had to spend very little time, and could type out a 5-10 page research paper on the topic in just a few hours. AIU attempts to make their programs accessible to those who might be considering a career change, so the first few courses in each sequence are designed as an introduction for those who might not be as familiar with the concept. That said, in my opinion, most of my bachelors degree work was a breeze with the exception of some of the programming courses, which I just happen to loath to begin with. My experience with the masters has been more challenging. The first couple of courses were again easy, but more recently, I have spent significant amounts of time on. Particularly in the Cryptography Concepts course. I am not sure if my brain doesn't want to do anything more complex than a simple substitution cipher or not but it was a difficult class. The 5 week format seemed only to compound the problem, requiring me to spend hours and hours trying to figure out math my brain did not like at all. The text book wasn't helpful either... well written I guess... but so dry and dull that I'd have rather watched the paint age on my walls than to attempt to read it. I did however learn a lot about cryptology that I had not known before. The network security courses were also difficult, but at least they were interesting. The only class that I feel the 5 week format did not work in at all was the java programming course in the masters IT series. Java was a new language for me, I'd not had any exposure to it before. I managed to use the text and Internet resources enough to pass the class with an A even... but don't ask me to write you a java application, I just do not feel that I learned anything from it. Anyhow, that's my ramble about AIU for the morning.
Re: Re: AIU Masters in 10 months? I'm 22 and I currently teach 4 sections of Specialized Computer Technology (while a masters is preferred, a bachelors is technically all I needed to fill the accreditor's requirements) at the local technical college specifically to earn additional money to pay down my student loans. This is my first quarter teaching, but so far it's been a wonderful experience and I truly enjoy it. I'm younger than the majority of my students but that has not been a problem at all. My student satisfaction ratings are high and a number of my students have asked if I would consider teaching other courses so they could take a class with me again. I'm actually thinking about switching to full time community college teaching sometime after I complete my masters and service obligations to my present full time employer. I think my experience as both an on-campus and a distance student have helped me significantly. I well remember the instructors who came to class ill prepared and whose lack of preparation and direction made me loath coming to class. I also remember those instructors who made their class engaging and whose accessibility made me truly enjoy the experience. I'm trying to take the best points from my experience and emulate that for my students. So far.. it's working.
Re: Re: AIU Masters in 10 months? The only problem with this is that I am not aware of any NCU doctoral grad currently working as a full-time tenure-track professor at any university. I would love to be corrected if I am wrong. Basically this appears to be marketing the idea of doing a traditional two years worth of study in just over one year. It can be done, but is not a snap. I have seen this done at other unviersities for those who want to work very hard for a concentrated amount of time. Anyone who has pursued a typical 3 year J.D. program knows what I am talking about. I did my 44 semester hour masters in one calendar year. Of course, I transferred three previously completed graduate courses into the program, and took a full load during the fall and winter semester and spring and summer terms. Thank goodness, I was working for the university at the time--I could never have done it otherwise. Tony Piña Administrator, Northeastern Illinois University
Re: Re: Re: AIU Masters in 10 months? An Associate Professor at Mountain State University is a graduate of NCU. http://www.mountainstate.edu/majors/onlinecatalogs/graduate/trustees/default.aspx
Re: Re: Re: Re: AIU Masters in 10 months? This individual has a PhD from North Central not from the Northcentral University. Not the same university.
You might be right, he appears in the roster of dissertations at NCU http://www.phddissertations.com/
