Collegecreditprograms.com : A new college credit clearinghouse?

Forum tip - The small quote symbol with the plus sign after it allows you to quote multiple posts at one time when replying. Look at the bottom right of a post.

For military personnel, there are free options like DANTES, the Servicemembers Opportunities Colleges Consortium, the American Council on Education Military Guide, base education offices, etc that assist them.

Why pay money when there are multiple, well established, and free to the service member options available?

 

Just my own opinions:
No one cares about patents. They mean less than nothing. They do not lend credibility. I could patent 100 things tomorrow and it would mean nothing about their value. I can patent a bag of dirt. It means nothing.
As a marketing executive you're doing a poor job. You dropped into a discussion forum that is populated by a group of particularly intelligent and well educated people. You thought that you could simply drop a brochure in our laps and that we would all salivate at the prospect of giving you our money. The problem is that most of the people on this site know more about this subject than you. You have chosen to market your product to us and you seem to have succeeded in alienating most of our members. You might want to consider a shift in strategy. Best of luck.

 

If there are accredited schools that have positive (meaning it can be documented) relationships with this outfit, fine. But I'm only hearing their claims. Or if there were customers who could be positively verified and who used this to get credits at accredited schools, then fine. (I mean fully used...they pay the service, go through the service's process, and the service connects to the school to get the students their credits.) If not....

Then, at best, they charge people to teach them how to prepare a life-learning assessment. At worst, they connect them to mills.

She can say the service doesn't sell degrees. Fine. But that doesn't change a thing.

We've heard a lot from this person, but nothing from anyone else. With almost 3 million credits earned by students using this service, wouldn't there be some evidence somewhere of it all? If students got an average of 30 credits--and that is a huge assumption--then we're talking about more than 100,000 successful students. Where are they? And where are the schools who say, "Yes, we took this service's product developed for our students and awarded the requested credits."

Just wondering.

I'll confess, I just can't read her posts. Anytime we have someone who floods us with verbiage, it's never good, nor productive. It's usually just a lot of b.s. that has to be sorted through and refuted. Legitimate operations can give simple answers.

 

Point taken. The patent shows proof of longevity - thanks.

 

Patent proves this program is not an overnight scam. It has longevity and value. Happy to set up a demo with the dev team.

 

Point taken and sorry but there have been lots of assumptions posted and lots to clarify. I have offered not only a conversation with a college consortia CEO but an online demo with the dev team. Take us up on this or not, but you guys have assumed a lot and said we were issuing degrees and credits - we are not and we are NOT preparing a life-learning assessment. We are taking what the student has earned and learned and mapping that via our platform to hundreds of options (from schools we work with) where they can get a degree that they want to get - and then provide them with a breakdown of all costs and fees and who will take which credit and they get to compare, online, on campus and lots of other options.

Degree planning. That is our service. Not a degree mill or an institution to give you life / work credits.

 

I have offered not only a conversation with a college consortia CEO but an online demo with the dev team. Take us up on the offer - you might be surprised. But to be clear...

Degree planning. That is our service. Not a degree mill or an institution to give you life / work credits.

 

You could not do what we offer in any reasonable amount of time. We take what the student has earned and learned and map it via our platform to hundreds of options (from schools we work with) where they can get a degree that they want to go after and we then provide them with a breakdown of all costs and fees, who will take which credit and the student gets to compare, online, on campus and lots of other options. We show how much and how long to get that degree based on the school(s) they pick and what the costs are.

We started out with serving the military and have been an advocate for them when schools have refused to accept legitimate training for credit. You can do it yourself, but compare all the data points we offer in a matter of hours to what you would have to replicate in months. I think our fee and desire to help you get your degree quickly and for the lowest cost possible has value.

Thanks for your help on the reply with quote tip.

 

OK, I'm willing to engage because my research, and answers Stephanie has given, indicates enough credibility to make it clear this isn't an out-and-out scam; too much longevity (verified through multiple sources) and too meny credible references (3rd party, not ones she's provided.)

I don't think Rich is correct in his assessment here; it seems unlikely there's the typical scam that Hamilton and the other mills with the "life experience evaluation" used to use, and they're probably not referring to mills, either... though I'm still skeptical about claims of prior learning at the graduate level for reasons previously stated.

The president of the company (who hides his name from all the websites for some mysterious reason) is legit and his education connections are also legit. My guess at the moment is that they're selling something that nobody who reads DegreeInfo and BAin4weeks and does some research can't figure out for themselves for free. And that's not that much different than many other businesses, such as the people that sell guides for the CLEPS and DTTS exams and such... but I'm still willing to be convinced otherwise, and I will (in a few days, when I have some time) actually take her up on the demo offer and report back.

Now... that said, on to Stephanie's mostly non-responses and my original questions. Stephanie, here are my thoughts:

First off, if you're trying to gain credibility for your product to an educated audience (which is mostly what degreeinfo is), no offense, but you're doing a simply terrible job. Patents and a paypal account have nothing to do with the legitimacy of an educational institution (see detailed explanation below), so even though it appears what you're doing probably is legit, the way you're defending it makes it seem fraudulent, because it's straight out of the playbook of the mills. So if you want to gain credibility... you need to listen to what people are saying here and change your tactics.

I did ask for a reference to the patent. It's nice you have it and that you've supplied it. I've read over the patent (no need to Google search it; best resource is USPTO.gov). It's an interesting patent, and I can see that the concept has some value and, properly implemented, could be really cool and helpful.

That said, it's not really necessary, in every reply, to let us know over and over that your process is patented. While it is an interesting process, and is clearly more sophisticated than what a counselor at one of the Big 3 would offer, it's far from unique, and the majority of people wouldn't need something with that level of sophistication to choose a good option for them. It's simply not true that you couldn't achieve the end result (find a great, inexpensive degree from a properly accredited school, without an insane amount of effort) in ways other than using your service. That doesn't make your service pointless, fraudulent, or unnecessary. Quit overselling and people might actually see the value in what you have, for some people.

Second, with regard to the big 4, for someone who claims to be working with a company that deals extensively with prior learning credit and credit-by-exam, you certainly ought to know better than to talk about Charter Oak's $435 per credit hour rate, because that rate is completely irrelevant to someone seeking credit for prior learning and credit-by-exam. In fact, their cost for credit-by-exam comes out to about $35/credit hour including the exam cost for CLEP/ ($10/hr if you're in the military and don't have to pay for the exams themselves.) That's about $100 an hour less than the Colby Community College you quoted. And there are a bazillion schools like Colby that offer similar or less expensive per-credit hour rates, and that info is available for free here at degreeinfo. (See? We do actually know what we're talking about here.)

Having read your patent, it looks like what you're basically doing is assessing skills, certificates, work experience, and the like, and using the ACE and other criteria to match it with schools that offer similar coursework (and, presumably, credit-by-exam or credit-by-portfolio.) So yes, this is a convenience, but it's hardly revolutionary. And, again, one can go to one of the Big 3 and speak to a counselor, for free, and get input about what exams one could take, and other means of earning credit based on one's experience, training, etc. It won't be as detailed, but if the goal is to get the degree, the level of detail isn't that important if one is willing to do the legwork, which ought to be part of earning a college degree anyway... the ability to figure things out is certainly a skill college grads are expected to have.

Also, just for the record, repeatedly stating the existence of a patent and the fact you have a Paypal account is no guarantee of legitimacy. There was a well-known mill, Century University, whose big claim to fame was that their educational processes were ISO9001 certified... which was true, but meaningless in the context of educational services. And the same can be said for the applicability of a patent to legitimacy of a business. ISO9001 certification means you've documented procedures. You could get ISO9001 certification for a concrete life jacket and you'd get it, but it doesn't mean the product would be any good. Likewise, a patent says you've got a patentable invention, but nothing about the legitimacy of the organization owning the patent. Hell, I could go and *buy* a 10 year old patent and use it to claim legitimacy if that worked. But it doesn't. So, while I'm not saying your organization is fraudulent, because I don't believe it is... you are doing your organization a huge disservice by relying on those factors to verify its legitimacy.

Now, as to my questions that you indicated you'd answered, here's the list, requoted from above, of the ones that don't have any detailed answers (and one or two more, based on what you've said.)

1. You claim that military service personnel have no access to good information about how to get credit for their trainings and certifications. Can you provide substantiation for this statement? The base education officers at practically every military installation in the world provide detailed information on paths to college credit, including information about the Big 3 schools and credit-by-exam options through them, and certainly DANTES/DTTS is known to everyone in the military education programs. Additionally, DegreeInfo is a pretty widely known resource among BEOs as well, and the resources here are pretty complete. Given that, are you still comfortable making the claim that what you offer is unique and irreplaceable, and that BEOs have no idea what they're doing?

2. You've mentioned a list of 100+ schools on your website. Do you have specific written agreements in place with each listed school? If not, what criteria was used to determine inclusion of a school on that list?

3. Of the 2900 colleges and universities listed you mention, very, very few allow more than 15 to 30 credits to be awarded for exam or portfolio-based learning. So you have, say, 100 schools you claim to partner with. Are the Big 3 included in that group? What schools receive the most referrals? (I'll do the legwork with the provided information to see how many portfolio/exam credits those schools accept.)


4. You claim "the main reason students pick our patented program is that you cannot figure this out on your own. " Can we agree that this statement isn't true? I can acknowledge that it might be a challenge, or take more time, but it is certainly not impossible to figure this out on your own.

5. Can you give me an example of a circumstance where a client of your service would find your service to be a dramatic time-saver, or have some major advantage over, say, simply going directly to Charter Oak, Excelsior, Athabasca or Edison and working out a credit-by-exam and credit-by-portfolio strategy there?

6. You make references to experience or certification/training based credit for masters and doctoral degrees. Given that all 6 regionals frown heavily on any prior work for graduate degrees (the thought being that it should all be new work), can you elaborate on what sort of prior work credit is available toward masters and doctoral degrees, and which schools you work with that provide these?

7. There are repeated references to "Degreequest." Is this your trade name for your patented school research tool?

8. Why are you claiming a trademark for "rapidpath" with respect to degree granting, when the only registered mark for that name is associated with computer networking?

9. If your owner, and the main office, is based in Florida, why the misdirection about having an admin staff and addresses in two different places in California, as well as another address in Knoxville, TN? Why the obfuscation between 3 or 4 different websites that, with a little research, can be tied together? Again, it isn't illegal, but it certainly raises red flags and looks millish. Credible companies mention their various resources and sites, and there's certainly SEO value in linking related properties to each other, so it just doesn't make much sense.

I'm currently leaning in the position of believing that your program may be legitimate, but so far, I'm not seeing much value beyond what one can get for free by reading John's book, articles on degreeinfo, Lawrie's BAin4weeks site, and probably several other resources. I'm also seeing a lot of inflated claims and a lot of misdirection. I've already shifted from my initial position, and I'm willing to evaluate any additional info you provide. If you can clarify the issues above, that would definitely be helpful.

 

Also, the rate StephanieCCP quoted

isn't close to Charter Oak's highest per credit cost, for a full-on Charter Oak course with a professor, either. Charter Oak course tuition is $258 for a CT resident, $339 for a non-CT resident. It doesn't inspire confidence that the rep trying to sell CCP as a degree planner should significantly misstate a school's tuition rate. Charter Oak is very transparent on their Tuition and Fees page.

 

Hmm interestingly enough while scanning through ACE organization i came across two that seem similar to the topic on hand

Higher Education. Customized. | CollegePlus

and

The College Network | Education Made Possible!

The Collegeplus website is startlingly similar to what a clean legitimate website of college credits might want to look like and more importantly Collegeplus is ace approved.

 

I have 19 years on Active Duty and have watched a lot of people easily figure out where to go to school and how to transfer credits without paying a fee for a service like you are advertising. Charging service members a fee when they have so many free options available (see my previous post) is wrong and I feel bad for somebody who is duped into paying it.

 

Quite right - you never did. You (correctly) wrote Colby Community College and that's the one I looked up. I misquoted you (sorry) and wrote "Colby College" in error. That led Kizmet to the school in Maine.

I've apologized to her for my typo - and now to you. We good? :smile:

Johann

BTW - when I said you hadn't answered Chip's questions - your post responding to them was not yet showing. Might be the well-known DI-delay on posts by new members. I'm just guessing, here. Anyway, I was obviously wrong - but had no way of knowing it. Again -- I'm sorry.

 

What I'm not hearing is what you get for your money. There's a lot of noise in her answers and I'm not sure that's coming through.

 

I dunno, Rich. Sounds pretty plain to me, as long as I remember William of Ockham (Occam) - "keep it simple."

"We take what the student has earned and learned and map it via our platform to hundreds of options (from schools we work with) where they can get a degree that they want to go after and we then provide them with a breakdown of all costs and fees, who will take which credit and the student gets to compare, online, on campus and lots of other options. We show how much and how long to get that degree based on the school(s) they pick and what the costs are." -Stephanie

What you get, I surmise - is a degree plan with

(a) a focus on credit maximization from all sources
(b) multiple options
(c) very specific instructions & cost info

The dispute seems to be - how much, if anything, should be paid for such a service.

Johann

 

Which schools? And of the magnitude claimed? I have no doubt they do what you quote, but are there agreements in place to accept this service's recommendations?

If they....

a) Took a student's background, experiences, knowledges, previously earned credit, etc., and then...
b) Settled on the best accredited school for that student's situation, and then...
c) Helped the student build the portfolio, and then...
d) Advocated a certain amount of credits (based on the student's inputs and the expectations/standards of the receiving school), and then...
e) The school selected accepted the credits based on the evaluation of the student's portfolio, then....

...I'd believe it. But is any of that really happening? If so, with which schools? If so, with which students? Where does, say, Excelsior College or WGU say "Hey, we partner with these guys. They turn in really good portfolios with their customers and we tend to accept their recommendations. Yadda, yadda." Where's that?

Yeah, it's simple. But it's also very incomplete, despite the verbal barrage.

 

... and that's why I asked for more specific answers. We'll see if we get them.

 

OK, wow, yes, agreed 110%... at:

I think she now knows this is not the "usual" forum...