SNHU vs Liberty vs Bellevue

I have applied for all three university for undergrad management programs. Which is the best program education wise? One of the reasons i love this site is because we have so many adjuncts that teach is so many schools. It's like having someone in on the inside. Have anyone attended these universitys lately.

P.s. I am proud to point out my first bachelor's has been achieved if you take a look in my signature line below.

 

I'm completely biased on this subject. Out of the three I would and did chose Liberty (LU). My reasons are expressed in these forums and have a lot to do with Liberty playing NCAA D1 sports. But for this post I'm going a different direction. Strictly speaking on the academic side of the house I'm pretty sure out of those three LU is the only school classified as an R3 by Carnegie. This is a very recent reclassification and I think only happens every five years.

 

Liberty is the most traditional of the three meaning that they probably have higher-quality professors. SNHU operates just like a for-profit with a bunch of adjuncts with high turnover rates and low pay.

 

This question can be tackled in one of two ways--or both.

First is the question of the process. Which school(s) offer(s) the way in which you wish to learn? Which offers the professors you want (and can you take classes from them)? Which school(s) can you afford? That kind of stuff.

The second is from which school do you wish to hold a degree? There's only one on your list that offers a distinctly different identity. It's up to you, of course.

 

I don't think anyone is going to look at a degree from any of those schools and say "What a load of crap!"

Might you face bias with a Liberty degree if you're applying to, say, the Clinton Global Initiative for work? Maybe. But that's what you get when you have a school that involves itself in politics as much as is legally permissible. You get political opinions about your school.

In terms of educational quality, it depends. As sanantone notes, Liberty likely has the most stable faculty. However, if you take a science course it might not resemble any sort of science that is accepted by the broader scientific community. How would that impact your business degree? Probably not at all.

SNHU has a fleet of adjuncts. But they also have (last I checked) canned curriculum like many of their for-profit comrades. The benefit for you, as a student, with canned curriculum is that it provides uniformity. You will never sign up for Accounting I and have a tenured professor, who loves to test the limits of academic freedom, spend the entire semester using the class as a platform to rant about Ayn Rand or, as once happened to me at Scranton, birth control (yes, the entire semester and no, the course had nothing to do with birth control).

Personally, to Rich's second point, if I had to pick which school I wanted to have a diploma from and which I would feel the most pride in, it would be Bellevue. That's really just because of school history.

Liberty was founded by a segregationist as a haven for white Christians. SNHU was a for-profit secretarial college that eventually switched to non-profit and borrowed heavily from the UofP playbook for marketing. Bellevue has a rather "ordinary" history, comparatively. It was founded as a school focusing on adult education. Nothing controversial about that at all.

 

I am leaning towards Bellevue and Liberty as of now with SNHU coming in third. Thanks for the input so far..any more students or staff on DI that have attended? I feel Liberty will be a Teir 1 in five years and will keep moving up. As far as the white segregation thing, well I have to say in 1971 most whites were this way. I doubt he was any different. I attended FMU a HBU, want to talk about segregation? Anyways you can not be for HBUs and then complain about a white guy 50 years ago wanting to do the same. Whites have as much right to secure their culture as we do.

It's very sad you can not even bring Liberty up and on this board anymore. Yet many other older schools were segregated. Sweet Briar comes to mind and yet everybody's all lovey with them. In reality it's anti Christianity at its best going on. It's just cool to be liberal and anti Christian.

 

Is that identity so strong it might overpower the value of my degree?

 

Why can't you bring it up? You did and you received some thoughtful and honest answers.

It's true that many (most) colleges and universities were, at one point, segregated. Liberty, however, was not a university that happened to be segregated. It was founded specifically to be segregated. So, bit of a difference there.

I have nothing bad to say about the University of Scranton, which is decidedly Christian (Catholic - Jesuit). Or even about a number of other Christian schools. Liberty, however, was founded by a segregationist specifically to be a place where white men could "escape" segregation. And considering his son continues his bombastic legacy, I have a relatively poor opinion of the school, overall.

But perhaps most importantly, you are aware that criticizing a Christian school isn't the same as criticizing Christianity, right?

 

Words can not ...never mind.

 

I cannot know what Jerry Falwell, Jr. feels about race relations. What I know is that the school he presently runs, which was founded by his father during his lifetime, was founded on the principles of segregation.

Liberty has naturally distanced itself from that position. But, again, you're talking about a position that was taken during the current president's lifetime and what was likely a central part of his upbringing.

So I don't think it falls into the category of "ancient history" to be forgotten and discarded as a thing of the past quite yet. At least, I don't think it unreasonable for a person to look at this very recent thing and say "Wow, yeah, that's a bit too fresh for me to be comfortable with."

Naturally, you may feel differently. And that's your choice. I never said that anyone who attends Liberty is a segregationist. But to act like it happened so many years ago that it simply doesn't matter seems a bit of a stretch. Particular because this wasn't a passing policy it was the purpose for the foundation of the school.

And some wounds don't actually heal with time. That's one of the reasons I wholeheartedly support taking Andrew Jackson's face off of currency (and anything else of significance).

 

Yes, yes, I know that reality is really making it difficult for you to carry on your narrative that the big, mean liberals are persecuting you by pointing out the documented history of a specific school. Honestly, it's the last step before we start throwing you to the lions!

You'll notice that very few criticisms on these boards of Liberty University actually involve religion at all. They more often center around the social views of Jerry Falwell, Sr. The political views of Jerry Falwell, Jr. And, every so often, the economic consequences of funneling government money into purely religious institutions while allowing them to legally discriminate against employees and students through a number of legal exceptions.

None of these things, mind you, are even remotely "anti-Christianity." You might just have to accept the fact that, as you belong to the dominant religion in this country, you are not an oppressed minority (at least on the basis of your faith alone).

 

My brother attended SNHU and has always spoke positively about the school and the faculty.

 

These are very vague ideas demanding a great deal of individual context. YMMV.

 

True and I feel you.

 

Having been involved in the Sweet Briar thread(s) I'm not sure I understand how anyone has been "lovey" with them. To me it was an example of "the small, liberal arts college as an endangered species" discussion and whether last ditch efforts to save them would succeed and for how long. The jury is still out on the question and I expect that we might continue to update that thread into the future. Personally I don't care much whether they stay or go but it's interesting to watch the process from afar. I am not aware of any segregationalistic tendencies on the part of Sweet Briar and if they ever existed, how they are relevant to the discussion at hand.

 

I fail to see where we were "lovey" with Sweet Briar, either. I was pretty emphatic in my criticism of them as well.

 

HBCUs are historically black colleges that were started because blacks were not allowed to attend white schools. They were started out of necessity. Anyone can attend an HBCU now. Interestingly, white people can benefit from Affirmative Action when applying to public HBCUs concerning admissions and scholarships. If more white people don't want to apply to HBCUs, that is not the schools' fault.

 

Anyone can attend LU so I'm not sure why this even matters right now. This is a real question, at what time in LU's history did they say this is a white only school? The Civil Rights Movement ended in 1968, LU was founded in 1971. Intergration was already happening all over.

 

They were founded to serve whites only and that did not end till the late 60's. So it's an example of a school that was segregated and does "still" not allow males. Verses Librety which has never, not once, ever been whites only.