NY Times: article critical of U of Phoenix

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/education/11phoenix.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin

Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits

PHOENIX — The University of Phoenix became the nation’s largest private university by delivering high profits to investors and a solid, albeit low-overhead, education to midcareer workers seeking college degrees.

But its reputation is fraying as prominent educators, students and some of its own former administrators say the relentless pressure for higher profits, at a university that gets more federal student financial aid than any other, has eroded academic quality.

<snip>

But many students say they have had infuriating experiences at the university before dropping out, contributing to the poor graduation rate. In recent interviews, current and former students in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington who studied at University of Phoenix campuses in those states or online complained of instructional shortcuts, unqualified professors and recruiting abuses. Many of their comments echoed experiences reported by thousands of other students on consumer Web sites.

<snip>

“Their business degree is an M.B.A. Lite,” said Henry M. Levin, a professor of higher education at Teachers College at Columbia University. “I’ve looked at their course materials. It’s a very low level of instruction.”

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Good to hear that people are talking about the "University" of Phoenix.

 

There is only one well known, regionally accredited distance learning institution that we have ever made a conscious decision to *not* include in any of our online databases or to accept advertising from.

We've been torn at times because I know there are people that have good experiences with said school, and we have several regular contributors here that teach for said school. But it's articles like this and consistent commentary from students, that make us think this is still the right decision.

 

Let me put it out there right away that I teach for UoP, but it's hardly profitable for me, so I have no real financial interest with the school. I could easily make more by working overtime or paid details.

With that being said, IMO they get a bad rap in many instances as far as educational quality. I can't speak for the levels of customer service, marketing strategies, etc., as I've never been a student there.

However, teaching CJ at the undergrad level, I've found the amount of work required to be comparable to what was expected of me in my undergrad program, which was at a rather generic RA liberal arts college. The quality of instruction, of course, completely depends on the instructor, and with 7,000+ faculty members UoP is bound to have a few bad ones. However, all the instructors I went through faculty training with seemed well qualified, articulate, and enthusiastic. Ditto for my faculty mentor, who supervised the first course I taught.

In the end, I think UoP is what you make of it. It's certainly not Ivy League, but then again neither are 99% of the schools out there. As we like to say at work.....it gets you in the door.

One last thing....if the school is so bad academically, why are they not on probation with their accreditor?

 

I have taken several classes at UOP and now through Excelsior. So far, the UOP classes have been far more rigorus.

Excelsior's online classes are basically a weekly discussion with NO instructor facilitation, weekly 5 qtn quiz, open book mid-term and final (also 5 qtns) and a 2000 word research paper. My instructors have given little feedback on assignments and a couple of times got some very critical feedback but still got a 95 out of 100 on the assignment. Go figure?

I like Excelsior and will be graduating soon and I am not "bagging" on Excelsior nor am I advocating for UOP; simply sharing my experience.

I guess every school has its pros and cons....

 

I have heard some pretty bad things about AIU as well, although I don't wish to disparage any student or former students of AIU.

Take care,

Abner

 

Bruce:

One last thing....if the school is so bad academically, why are they not on probation with their accreditor?[/QUOTE]


Good point.

Abner

 

I teach at UoP, and also at a State U. I can directly compare several courses in my discipline.

In the same course, I find more adult discussions at UoP, more intellectual rigor, and simply put, more information and learning at UoP than @ traditional state U. The State U students are underprepared, undermotivated, and care-less than the UoP students who are paying big bucks for the same thing.

Even though State U carries more prestidge and pays me substantially more to teach exactly the same course.

From what I know, I'd hire a UoP grade over the State U grad anytime.

 

I took a one-credit hour course (MATH401 - History of Mathematics) and earning a B in that course required a lot of work for one-credit hour. The course was writing and research intensive. The only downside to the course was the textbook chosen for the course. UoP is expensive but so are many other private colleges and universities.

 

Actually, that's another one that I have seen a lot of complaints about... and I've been pretty ambivalent about UoP because, as Bruce points out, there are plenty of people that have had good things to say, both professors and students. Russ Blahetka, one of the original Gang of Six, also teaches at UoP and has expressed both appreciation and frustration. So it's clear that probably many if not most of the for-profit schools (and certainly some nonprofits as well) are a mixed bag.

The decision to exclude was made a looooong time ago, probably 2002 or 2003, and the decision to *include* AIU was made at a time when we really didn't have much information about it, good or bad. We definitely need to take a look at all of those issues when we upgrade the DegreeFinder database and integrate it more fully with the discussion board.

One of the things we have been tossing about as a possible future projects is to incorporate some means of allowing student comments to be part of the process (similar to another site that's started up, but we have what I think will be a more interesting idea...) The catch is finding a way to prevent "ringers", whether actual students encouraged by the school to say good things or people who aren't students at all and are paid to make posts (similar to the blogging scams that have been cropping up recently...) I think we can do it, we'll just require a lot of thought to make it happen.

 

I was with UoP as a campus chair full time for all of 2004, then taught as an adjunct for two more years. I have strong feelings on both sides of this argument, and I feel the downside to UoP is always exaggerated.

Despite the one (ONE) professor's comments about the MBA, I do feel students have a lot of work to do to earn their credits and degrees. But....

UoP panders to the middle. There is no effort to seek out and reward excellence, neither with students nor instructors.

I believe that if UoP has a higher-than-normal attrition rate--and has anyone really determined this?--it can be attributed to their high-pressure sales and open admissions policies, coupled with a reasonably rigorous curriculum. They admit too many unqualified people, true. But more egregiously, they don't set expectations properly. The sales staff emphasizes how easy the programs are to do, when nothing could be further from the truth. So unprepared and unmotivated students--even if capable--often drop out and begin complaining.

Faculty quality varies tremendously. UoP is at fault here, too. On the one had, their requirements are pretty rigorous. Instructors must qualify for each course separately, demonstrating they have the required education (often minimum credits in certain subjects, in addition to the degree) AND experience (often 5 years or more) in the field. I'm simplifying it here; it's much more structured and difficult. But....

UoP doesn't seek out and reward teaching excellence. There are no programs to recognize and reward instructors, so many tend to drift to the minimum. (It gets old to deliver excellence each time out and have no one even recognize it, much less actually reward it.) I have taught more than 30 times for UoP and I've had exactly one evaluator/observer in my classroom.

UoP has three faculty levels for adjuncts, A, B, and C. A is automatic. So is B, getting it requires you teach 5 classes and get evaluated. C is hard, and at my campus at least, they don't provide you the opportunities to meet the requirements. (That way, they don't have to pay you more to teach.) Your pay is based upon three things, your faculty level, whether or not you hold a doctorate, and whether the class is undergraduate or graduate. As a BD-level faculty member (B level with doctorate), I make about $1,300 to teach a 3-credit grad course, 6 weeks. One night per week, 4 hours per night, plus lesson planning and grading homework. That works out to about $20-25 per hour, depending on how much time you spend outside the classroom. Not good.

UoP doesn't pay worth a damn. I mean, it's bad. I saw that with my excellent instructors, a few would stick around because they love doing it, but most of the really good ones would take their training and experience elsewhere after a while. Hey, no one should be doing it strictly for the money. But it should pay enough. And while I'm normally a defender of for-profit schools, saying, simply, that they're really no different than not-for-profits, it does bug me that UoP is a financial juggernaut, that some people are getting quite wealthy from it, and all the while they're paying their instructors (and all other non-recruiting staff) really poorly.

It's no wonder so many good instructors split, diminshing the overall quality of instruction. And with no systems in place to recognize excellence, remediate mediocrity, and ensure quality, it's also no wonder there are complaints. With a system built on using adjuncts, quality control is critical. But UoP has none.

 

If that's not an article with an agenda I don't know what is. One mildly positive paragraph in three pages? I'm quite sure that wasn't the ratio of positive to negative comments the author received in his/her research. Plus, dropping to the level of citing ripoffreport is exceedingly poor journalistic practice - every major corporation has tons of negative feedback on there.

 

I suspect that a lot of the criticism that University of Phoenix receives from professors is motivated by faculty labor issues. If UoPx put in some faculty-friendly policies like cushy lifetime tenure, the critics would quiet down immediately.

The biggest problem that I see is that the UoPx is horribly overexpanded. It offers classes at literally hundreds of widely scattered locations and employs more faculty than most universities have students. There's endless turnover and occasionally the university does seem to be having trouble maintaining a uniform product.

Accreditation is an issue for UoPx, since in my opinion it's grown too large and scattered for the NCA/HLC to oversee effectively. I really doubt if the UoPx model would be accreditable today if the whole thing was proposed de-novo. But the UoPx evolved gradually over time and has reached a point where it has so much money and (probably) political clout that it's become the elephantine tail that wags the NCA/HLC commission dog. Any attempt by the accreditor to change the rules that UoPx is operating under, such as requiring its countless remote sites to be individually accredited, would generate tremendous amounts of very expensive litigation.

 

Rich: With a system built on using adjuncts, quality control is critical. But UoP has none.

I agree. And therein lies the core problem that all growing online-based institutions must face at one time or another: quality control. Once an institution gets so large, how on earth does it maintain the needed infrastructure to ensure that quality education results from student experiences?

basrsu

 

I think a lot of people dont like UofPx because they use SPAM to get students. can you really blame people for thinking that they are not legit when you open one email for hoodia and natural male enhancement and then another one for online degrees fast from UofPx. i think they tarnish distance learning as a whole with their market tactics.

 

Rich: "UoP doesn't pay worth a damn."

John: Where they do pay worth a damn is for their telemarketers (= telephone admissions counselors). During the years we were marketing the Heriot-Watt distance MBA, we had three people doing this job. Salary, not commission. One was just fantastic -- got results triple the other two combined. Turned out that Phoenix people regularly called competitors to see how they were handling phone inquiries, and when they found a great one . . . well, they offered our guy more than twice the salary + generous commissions, which we could not match, so he headed for the Phoenix office in San Francisco.

 

UoP doesn't offer commissions anymore, if it ever did. But it gets around that.

First, UoP pays its "enrollment counselors" in the mid-$40K range to start. By the way, that's almost TWICE what it pays its academic counselors (the people who keep you on your degree track, handle complaints, work credit transfers, etc.) But that's just where the fun begins. If an "enrollment counselor" does well--meaning he/she enrolls enough people, then he/she is "promoted." But a promotion doesn't mean a change of duties (like supervising other "enrollment counselors"). Instead, they keep doing their jobs, but get paid more for it. We had one "enrollment counselor" making more than $100K--more even than the campus director. So, while they don't pay commissions, they do increase pay due to your production, which has the same effect.

Another thing UoP does is spend a great deal of time with on-the-job training. Enrollment managers listen in on many phone calls, offering guidance after each one. This is especially true for new or non-producing "enrollment counselors." They also hold sales meetings, in-house training, etc. But they offer almost no training to other UoP staff members (except new faculty, who do go through a very good training program.) It is so obvious where the emphasis is.

What if you don't produce? Brush up the resume, baby, 'cause you're gone. You could be a highly capable counselor, effectively screening people to enroll only the ones that will succeed, offering sound advice, etc. Doesn't matter. If you don't produce, g-bye. Telemarketing boiler room? You bet.

Here's another tasty nugget: what percentage of gross revenues are spent on faculty costs? (Salaries and training, mostly.) Wait for it....wait for it....wait......Times up! Did you say EIGHT (8) percent? You didn't? You must have been thinking in terms of some other higher education paradigm. Because at UoP, faculty costs are a tiny, tiny portion of expenses.

By the way, the career paths at UoP go through but one department: enrollments. If you look at their campus directors, most come from sales, not academics. And academics has a chain-of-command that goes separately from the campus administration. Which is good because most campus directors don't know jack about higher education. But sales? You bet.

Finally, a campus's success is measured in but two ways: enrollments and retention. Period. It doesn't matter that you have outstanding faculty, that your students think their programs are terrific, etc. If your campus's numbers aren't growing at an expected pace, boom! Heads roll. Regarding retention, everyone recognizes that faculty performance has a great deal to do with it, but there is absolutely no system for recognizing and rewarding faculty for their work--or even their performance related to retention. Faculty are, for the most part, merely line items on an expense report. And that's sad, because it chases a lot of good ones away. (Admittedly, a lot of good ones stay, but clearly for other reasons.)

Is it any different somewhere else? I don't know. But a year spent on the "way inside" and two more on the "sorta inside" have given me a few peeks into the system. It's like making sausage; you'd rather not know.

 

They are applying for ACBSP accreditation, which will cause a lot of things to change if they earn it. They will have to hire more full-time faculty, improve their programs, processes, and many individual campuses are being audited (including NVA where I used to work).

Hopefully they earn it and ramp-down the marketing bs for a little bit, they need to.