University of Phoenix Has Lost Half Its Students

Right you are. And I've often wondered what would happen if the Ivy League admitted say, the University of Nebraska. Would its sudden inclusion in an athletic league suddenly propel it to the top of the list of many college seniors?

There does exist a certain level of university where the notion of "better" is largely a matter of competitive pride moreso than anything else.

Is Cornell "better" than Stanford because of the former's inclusion in the Ivy League? Is Johns Hopkins, in fact, "worse" than Dartmouth? I think there are people who, given those choices, would select the Ivy League schools just to say they have an "Ivy League" degree.

Still, I wonder what would happen if the Ivy League suddenly admitted a non-elite school. Or, perhaps more interesting, what would happen if a current Ivy League school dropped out of the league altogether? Would Columbia hold the same prestige? Would people confuse UPenn and PennState even more? Would CEC acquire Brown? I doubt anything drastic would happen at all. I guess it falls in with my theory that if the entire Ivy League relinquished their institutional accreditation people would still clamor to get in.

 

The answer to these questions is, of course, yes. You wouldn't even ask is you had gone to a proper school. :chairfall::lol:

 

The downfall in the for-profit university is not surprising. The stockholders expect such a business to be quick and easy money from people, often, non-traditional students looking for a university to accommodate their needs. Unlike other for-profit businesses, for-profit universities work only to churn out students as quick as possible to make a buck on the nest person. Because they do not need to expect return customers as is expected at universities for example (with the exception of graduate school), they have no drive to improve the quality of the education but instead focus on marketing to get people in and out. From a business perspective, such a business is doomed to fail because as bad news spread, the reliance of marketing with no real substance will result in their downfall. So to those stockholders, I say good riddance. They invested in a industry that is worth as little as the degrees that it gives. No business can ever succeed without having substance to fall back on.

 

Really, truly, DL has been around for quite some time. I dated someone whose father in England taught music composition via DL and that was 1988. When I graduated from my first BA degree from a B&M school in 1996 I went to the library and bookstores to peruse the DL options in books since the internet was relatively new and didn't have much info at the time. I fell in love with PennState World Campus at that time because they offered a semester at sea for their DL students. Sadly, I didn't go for it and have always regretted it.

Not that this has anything to do with the OP topic except that IMO when I started seeing UoP advertisements I immediately didn't want to attend because I'd rather go somewhere where people wouldn't automatically assume (as someone posted earlier) distance degree = joke. My MSN was fully online aside from in person clinicals and it was from a traditional B&M school.