DEAC casualty - Allied American University bites the dust

Well, this seemed to come out of nowhere. They were recruiting faculty as recently as a few months ago.

Accredited Online University Degree Programs | Online College | Allied American University

 

Clearly we are lacking details but, on the face of it we see a little school offering Associates and Bachelors degrees in General Business, Criminal Justice and a few medical certs. Nothing to distinguish them in any way. Maybe they were just too generic to compete?

 

When I first moved to Wilkes-Barre, Penn Foster (I believe they were still Thomson at that point, though they went through a few names before that as well) was pretty well regarded, locally, as the distance education provider. More accurately, they were the correspondence school.

That doesn't mean that they had a reputation that could stand up to the local B&M schools, mind you. But most people knew about them. Many people had taken a course through them. I'd say the bulk of their alumni in that area used the school for complementary education (i.e. a carpenter takes the home inspection course or a regular mechanic takes the diesel mechanic course to expand existing skills rather than a lot of career changers).

A lot of the local "loyalty" was owed to the fact that their office was (and is) in Scranton, PA. Flash forward to years later and PF, though decidedly for-profit, still enjoys a neutral to slightly positive reputation in the area. People don't think of it as a "college" the way they think of all of the other degree granting schools. But the local vibe was definitely that PF was a good employer, a good company and was providing a good service. I even interviewed for an HR position there when I got out of the Navy (it was right around the time when they were transitioning to PF).

My suspicion is that a lot of these smaller schools catered to regional and niche markets once upon a time. I'm sure, like PF, that allied shipped courses nationally (possibly even globally). However, I'd also bet that they had some sort of regional influence that was much stronger than their national brand. That sort of regional loyalty works great as long as you are the correspondence school of that region. Once you have Phoenix, DeVry, ITT Tech and the local B&Ms now competing for the DL space I can see how it would push these smaller schools out of business.

Though, for all we know, the school was doing fine but the owners had a serious coke problem. But I'm willing to give them the benefit that it was more likely the former.

 

An NA school very few people have ever heard of, offering cookie-cutter programs, and $310/credit hour. What could've possibly gone wrong?

 

It feels like the work of the Bilderberg Group.

 

-------------

Fixed.

 

For-profit schools, necessarily, live and die on tuition revenues. They don't have endowments, they don't do fundraising. If they're profitable, there's pressure to distribute those profits to the owners. This leaves some schools on a thin edge. With the downturn in enrollments experienced by schools all over, plus the bad publicity received by the for-profit sector (and its attendant impact on enrollments), one can imagine a "university" with no particularly unique footprint might find itself under water.

We don't know what happened here, though.

 

Not yet, and not exactly, I guess. Bit odd, especially since they had achieved candidacy for RA accreditation (WASC). Their model included keeping a 10:1 student-to-faculty ratio. Isn't that pretty well unheard of in DL? Certainly not a profit-booster! Here's the Wiki - those two points sneaked up on me and nearly knocked me cold! :smile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_American_University

J.

 

I'm curious: I noted on the AAU website that students have the option to transfer to a partner university. Is it safe to assume that the partnered university is also DEAC accredited? Does DEAC provide oversight to ensure students still can earn an accredited degree? Does anyone know how that works? Thanks.

 

AAU is partnered with Grantham University, also DEAC-accredited. That's good for AAU students who want to transfer, as Grantham has been around for 60+ years and is as stable a DEAC school as you'll find.

Grantham University Partners with Allied American University - Grantham University

Interesting question, as AAU's accreditation with DEAC is due for renewal in June of this year. I would think that DEAC would extend accreditation to the end of the year for teach out and transfer purposes, but that's speculation on my part.

 

There are RA schools that lose their accreditation and close, too. Because CIE lost their accreditation, that's not an indictment on NA schools. If anything, it's a credit to the DEAC keeping to its standards.

That being said, AFAIK, CIE's issues were financial, not academic.

 

Lots of speculation about this school. Very few facts. Live and don't learn!

 

I'm not sure. We had a link to DEAC's deficiency report on the school re: the Show Cause, but the link doesn't work any more. As well, another poster wrote some time ago that he'd pulled up the deficiency letter directly from DEAC site and the school had taken hits in just about every category. No link was given. I tried today and couldn't find the letter via the DEAC site either. Old comments on another site said that CIE/WC was unable to adapt to new DEAC rules - particularly those which dealt with the qualifications required of instructors teaching certain subjects. So... who really knows, right now?

Anyway, time to stop speculating, I guess. We've been told. :smile:

J.

 

Well, the CIE situation is a separate matter. I'm also not sure what we've been told about AAU. All we know is that there was/is a partnership with Grantham. We still don't know why it's closing down.

Nothing wrong with speculating. It's a great deal of the discussions that take place on a message board and in life in general. I'm curious as to how much activity people think there would be if we all stopped speculating.

 

Here? Not much.

 

Right. Absolutely nothing. :smile:

J.