Why there is no priceline.com for colleges

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by [email protected], May 16, 2003.

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  1. MarkIsrael@aol.com

    [email protected] New Member

    Subject: Re: AIU fishy practices?
    Newsgroups: alt.education.distance
    From: [email protected] (Mark Israel)
    Message-ID: <[email protected]>
    Date: Fri May 16 13:42:46 EDT 2003

    In article <[email protected]>, msconfig <[email protected]> wrote:

    > I see a potential business opportunity here. An e-bay style site
    > where potential students post their official transcripts, resumes and
    > exam scores and then accredited colleges (selected by the potential
    > student from a list) bid for their business "officially" with credit
    > hours awarded and total fees.


    You can't get official credit hours based on a résumé. Anyone can lie on a résumé. Anyone can be honestly mistaken, too. You have to expand your résumé into a portfolio that will then be evaluated by a professor with the appropriate specialty. That is time-consuming and expensive.

    Aside from that: of course such a service would benefit prospective students. But what would it do for the colleges, besides drive their profit margin razor-thin? So I'm not expecting it any time soon.

    Yes, I know, priceline.com already does this for airlines and hotels. But the profits of airlines and hotels were razor-thin already, because travel agents were already doing this kind of comparison shopping. In the case of colleges, there is a corresponding information vacuum, which allows diploma mills to thrive, but which also allows accredited colleges to make their profits.
     

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