...here --> Southern New Hampshire University: How Paul LeBlanc’s tiny school has become a giant of higher education.!
It's just too bad they couldn't spend as much time on course and teacher quality. They save enough money by paying their adjuncts a horrible wage.
They pay their adjuncts $2200 per 8-week course. That's at least $1,000 more than I made per course at GCU.
Even though it was a long time ago, there is no mention in that article that SNHU started out as a for-profit institution. History | SNHU
Unfortunately, this is in line with most online adjunct positions that pay about the same. Sometimes I get few students asking me about academic careers. They only see the few faculty members that have a great salary and very flexible hours and travel all the time to present to conferences in exotic places but they don't see the other 98% that work for peanuts and struggle to get enough work every semester (the invisible adjunct). Our school is also following the steps of SNHU, more online courses with large amounts of students and less full time faculty. Full time faculty positions with benefits and retirement plans will be a thing of the past in 20 years from now. Let's face it, it is a lot more cost effective and efficient to hire people on a contractual basis, the faculty is forced to be up to date and there is no risk to the school as if there are not enough students then they don't have to pay faculty. If the program needs a new set of skills, there is no need to train faculty but just hire new faculty with a new set of skills. The new trend is to hire adjuncts that do research and publish under your name for the 2,200 per course. Why pay expensive faculty to do research when desperate adjuncts are willing to do it just to remain employed? If you don't like it, no problem, schools can go and hire people in India that will be more than happy to publish and take the 2,200 per course. Before there was the issue of not being able to attract enough faculty with doctorates on an adjunct basis but this is not longer the case with so many doctors out there with no work or under employed. Times are changing and if all the schools are following the same steps, the other ones will have no choice but to follow in order to remain in business.
I know a professor personally that teaches at a B&M and several online institutions. I got his pay at Axia and SNHU confused. That was my bad and I retract the statement about pay, but I stand by my statement about course and instructor quality. I took a handful of courses there and it wasn't pretty. There was minimal to no instructor interaction. In two of the courses the reading assignments were cut because "busy parents" complained to the administration, among other things. That's not the kind of academic rigor I'm proud to have on my transcript. Maybe things changed in a year or so. I hope so. They act exactly like a for-profit institution. They say anything to get and keep you in the door even if it isn't true. That article was pretty telling about their motivations and where they are headed. At least to me.
The gist was that I got a friend's Axia pay and his SNHU pay confused, sorry about that. The article was disturbing and I don't think they care much about academic or instructor quality.
How do you know that they don't care about academic quality? And how is the article disturbing? :cool2::suspect:
From personal experience and from the experience of two instructors teaching there now. In my opinion they only care about the bottom line. I think the article shows that, despite President LeBlanc's statement to the contrary.
SNHU is a great school! Just because they recruit doesn't make them terrible... there are a lot of for-profit schools that are a lot worse!! At the end of the day SNHU has a real B and M campus which is more than I can say some of these for-profit schools like AMU. Disclaimer I did grad from SNHU... I found it to be a great school. I am currently enrolled at Northeastern for my MBA... and it is a great program even though I have seen some negative reviews on it.