University of the People controversy

Discussion in 'Online & DL Teaching' started by Pastor Lincoln, Jan 18, 2019.

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  1. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    The U.S. Department of Education doesn't accredit anyone. However, there are accreditors recognized by the U.S. Department of Education that can accredit a non-secular institution of "higher consciousness/spiritual education." Saybrook University, while not as far outside the mainstream, teaches similar subjects. So, I would say that University of Sedona is not being honest.
     
  2. In comparison they are. Merely a comparison example.
     
  3. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

  4. dlbb

    dlbb Active Member

    The author of that report doesn't seem to be all there. I would be shocked if Harvard or similar schools did not require the GRE. To repeatedly pester their staff, including a dean, about this very clear requirement boggles the mind.

    Was this how they expected it to go down?
    Student: Dean of Harvard, how dare you require I take the GRE. Don't you know standardized tests should never be used for admissions?
    Dean: This is news to me. Let me change this requirement for you, Snowflake. It never dawned upon me until now how naive our policy was.
     
    Pastor Lincoln likes this.
  5. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

    Most, substantial all, students don’t care care where their tuitions and fees end up regardless of forprofit or nonprofit. Maybe some volunteers may have found the channeling of the fees to a for profit distasteful. Forbes is pretty free-market magazine - The jest of the article was something other than capitalism.
     
  6. I know that there are legitimate colleges and universities that do not require the GRE exam for a Master's degree such as Walden University. This consumer report is truly hilarious. It needs to be saved for people thousands of years in the future. They can look back on human history to see stupidity in the past.
     
  7. dlbb

    dlbb Active Member

    Pastor, that certainly is true. It is just a matter of selectivity. Some places have open admissions, to some extent, and will take anyone who can pay and is minimally qualified. Others may be selective, to a lesser degree, but allow readiness to be demonstrated in other ways, such as grades, letters of recommendation, etc. For somewhere like Harvard, which was in the consumer report, we would expect them to be as selective as possible.
     
  8. ITJD

    ITJD Active Member

    Well, all I can offer here is that a member of my family is presently going to UoP.

    Does it have fees? - Yes for folks that are going to it from first-world countries. For those folks that are not so fortunate, it's a free education. Fees are entirely manageable otherwise.

    Does the school have flaws? - Yes. Content that drives the coursework is largely open source and some classes are more put together than others. I'd say that roughly every third course has had serious rubric issues that the course instructors have to manage. Additionally, the faculty are volunteers.

    Can someone learn here? - Yes. You'll get out of it what you put in, and that's very much the same wherever you go.

    Accreditation etc. - It's DETC. Folks here know the ups and downs of that. However it's on par with U of Fairfax and others in that category. If it's got a bonus, the founders of the place are themselves from more eminent places.

    So would I be comfortable going there? - Not without other paper backing me up. As a content farm it's entirely appropriate and it's got a good mission that I can support. My family member has two degrees from a prominent university in the Boston area, so using this as a way to transition career roles to CS isn't a bad idea.
     
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  9. Garp

    Garp Well-Known Member

    Hilarious. People on Ripoff Report whining that they had to pay a 100 per class test fee. This is CLEARLY stated and has been since I first looked at the site. If this came as a shock to you then your reading comprehension is pretty poor and you probably don't belong in college.

    A Bachelors degree costs a total of around 4,000 and an MBA around 2,000. I believe texts (online) are included. That is very inexpensive for an accredited degree.

    Whoever compared the UOP degree to the Indian school was wrong. The Indian school had no recognized acreditation and was pretty useless except for personal edification (not sure it was valuable for that either at least at an academic level). UOP at least has recognized national accreditation and is useful in settings where the accreditor just has to be Dept of Ed/CHEA recognized.

    They not only have accreditation but links to other prestigious schools and connection to the Clinton Foundation (for whatever that is worth).
     
  10. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

  11. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

    I did the comparison of the business model to the Indian School - no tuition but fees - degrees of limited utility. There is no appetite to discuss uop so I am out of here. However, I think the Forbes article was more of the funneling of uop excess cash to a for-profit organization according to its 2017 990 filing.
     
  12. Garp

    Garp Well-Known Member

    Interesting Phdtobe. Hope they don't ruin a good concept. Meets a need for someone who needs an accredited degree to get ahead and cannot afford other options.
     
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  13. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

    I am with you, uop is a bargain regardless of where its surplus cash is being funneled. It has the best bargain mba out there. If deac can meets once needs then this is the place-know your risk tolerance before embarking on a non-ra institution.
     
  14. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    Over the past year, I was granted the opportunity to audit some MBA courses with UOP and give the administration feedback on my experiences and suggest improvements. It was a fun experience.

    The Professors UOP chooses are very sharp, and quite frankly many are overqualified in relation to the school, but I digress.

    The education served is excellent. The course structure is well-designed. The average student there communicates well.

    The two places where it all falls apart are the peer grading system and the administration's communication quality (or lack thereof). Starting with peer grading, the fact that they don't give students any orientation on how to grade papers makes for a tumultuous situation for any student who is smart enough to see the flaws in how their papers are graded and can fight back intelligently. Some of the reasoning students give for marking papers down is just flat-out ridiculous and without the challenge system in place, this school would've imploded already.

    The other issue is communication. I "disguised" myself as a different person asking for simple answers to basic questions like "what are the courses in MBA foundations?" That one never got answered because nobody seemed to know the answer. It wasn't until I got a new adviser that I finally got an answer and that was roughly 2 months after initially asking. I rarely got return emails from advisers. When asking questions as myself, one of my direct advisers just decided to stop answering altogether. No big loss, because before that she was responding to everything with form letters that addressed things I never asked. She was a special kind of idiot. Complaints to the Dean and Student Services went unanswered. This made me question whether these people who were said to be in those positions actually even existed. Hmmmm.

    The school did make a number of changes based on my recommendations, and they did actually fire the adviser who decided to go mute. But the one thing that continued to be a struggle was convincing them to drop the grade for scoring papers from the gradebook. To clarify, UOP's system turns out a grade for you for every paper you grade. The problem is that the grade has nothing to do with the way you grades the papers, it only scores you based on how close your grade is to the average grade given by other graders. So you could grade every single paper you get accurately and still somehow have a low grade for this because your grade isn't in line with the rest of your peer graders. In short, it's nonsense.

    So, my opinion is that the education provided by UOP is fine. The Professors are well qualified. The administration is AWFUL, borderline useless. As for the people who complained about the fees, well, that's the kind of stupidity you get at schools with open enrollment. You get a number of people who don't read well and have poor reasoning skills + a short fuse. Luckily, those people usually never make it to graduation and thank GOD for that.
     
  15. UoP from the way it sounds, they still need to make further changes in terms of administration. I cannot trust a school with poor administration. Just an opinion.
     

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