20-second rant: college "review" sites

Is anyone else sick of the 5 million college "review" websites promising student reviews but really advertising the same 15 lame old for-profit universities? What's the approach here? Do they seriously think the provide the 100th platform for reviews so that they can just sit back and wait for other people to write content, getting rich on advertisement?

Or do they get all their money through banner ads from said for-profit schools? What's up with that? "Oh, Argosy! They advertise all over the place on fake review sites, so they must be great - let me enroll!" Well, looking at the enrollment numbers, the system seems to work, and that makes me even more frustrated. How can people be so stupid and enroll in a school based on advertising? Why won't they do some research?

The saddest thing is that the majority of these people are not even stupid - they are just helplessly overwhelmed, first-generation students, etc. Thank God for boards like this one. Sometimes I think we should hand out t-shirts with the URL in high schools and at job fairs.

Here is my new favorite. I'm not doing them the favor and post their website here, but the title of that particular page is "Northeastern University Online Review," and it goes like this:

Northeastern University Online Review

Looking to finish classes faster than a traditional 16-week college semester? Then Argosy Online may be the perfect choice for you. They offer accredited degree programs that are accelerated, with courses lasting only 7.5 weeks each, allowing you to accomplish and begin new classes just about every eight weeks.

 

Yeah that can be pretty lame.

 

The deal is, there are several companies in the business of promoting the for-profit schools, and they, in turn, affiliate with the crappy so-called "review" sites you see, and pay them for ads or for the leads they generate. These sites have no interest in providing quality information, and I'd say 90% of them don't even understand the most basic issues associated with distance education.

For example, one large leadgen company was a major source of leads for the unwonderful Kennedy-Western and Clayton College schools and several other godawful programs. Even after repeated reports from different people about how they were advertising crappy, fraudulent, and unwonderful programs... the company refused to do anything because, literally, all they give a shit about is getting paid, and the crappy schools were paying big bucks for advertising.

Additionally, several of the large leadgen aggregators own literally hundreds of these crap sites to generate traffic, so you see the same high-profit schools advertised over and over.

And the other thing is, one of the major leadgen aggregators is owned by an equity firm who also happens to own a number of pretty overpriced for-profit schools, so it's sort of scratching each other's backs. Obviously the reviews are not objective at all, even though some of them claim to be.

We are in the process of trying to roll out some more complete and comprehensive information about various schools, hopefully with a lot of focus on the underrepresented but high-value state schools. I think the demand for good information now is much greater than it ever has been.