U of Phoenix hasn't changed for the better (yet, 5 Years Later)

There was another shady (DEAC accredited) institution named after a major city, the University of Atlanta.

 

It may reflect how old I am, but U o P's use of "Phoenix" brings to mind the mythical bird that would rise from it's own ashes, then I would think of the city. Seemed (and still does) a tad hokey.

 

It was very common for diploma mills to evoke geography in their names, sometimes with "State" included.

As part of the experiment I did in my Union PhD, I asked hundreds of HR professionals about the acceptability of degrees from a list of schools. I encouraged them to use whatever resources they normally employed to make such decisions, if any. My list included one each from schools with a variety of forms of institutional recognition., including RA, DETC, state approval, state authorization, and a diploma mill. Eleven in all. The most acceptable happened to be the RA school--it evoked both geography and "State" in its name. The second most acceptable? Columbia State University, probably the mot notorious and prolific diploma mill of that time. Later in the experiment, participants were given brief descriptions of each form of recognition that those schools had (or didn't, in the case of CSU). All eleven moved in the direction you'd expect--RA and DETC going up, state-approved and state-authorized going down. The category that finished last? Diploma mill, of course.

It demonstrated that a lot of people judge a book by its cover, never bothering to look inside.

About 15 years later, when I became an SPHR, I had to prepare for and pass the certification examination. This exam was based on a published body of knowledge by SHRM. Nowhere in that body of knowledge was the verification of educational credentials addressed. I have no doubts about why diploma mills continue to proliferate. Employers don't know, don't look, and don't care. (Heck, we've seen lots of cases where even after employees were caught with fake degrees, their employers rationalized the fact and retained them.)

 

Interesting. Thx. One of the weekly thankless jobs in our school/dept., is transcript evaluation. Did not have your info, but yes, there's a lot of "it sounds legit, so it must be legit" when evaluating transfer credit.

 

The city is named after the bird, so that's not entirely incorrect.

 

WADR, you do repeatedly "defend" them. As you point out, your actual exxperience with them was limited to one campus (or geographical area) 15 years ago. My experience with them was slightly earlier in another geograhical area. At my location, there was tremendous pressure to retain students and to "get them through" to the next class. Faculty (and this is a issue for just about all for-profit colleges (at least all the ones I've had experience with) have very little say in anything except deleivering course material. Whereas at public instistutions, faculty (and this is part of the accreditation process) are supposed to "control" the classroom. and the materials. Which is why I left (and the same with SNHU and GCU, etc., other PT stints). And certainly since your and my time there, they have had issues. To be fair, a colleague at another university knows a professor with a UoP doctorate that he says is very good. OTOH, the vast majority of UoP doctoral holders have not stacked up well, or interviwed well, in my experience, and are the reason I and many other people (not all) tend to discount a UoP degree holder.

 

Nonetheless, UoP headquarters are (or were), in fact, in or around Phoenix AZ.

 

Are.

 

No, I don't defend them. But I do counter misinformation, a lot of which comes from uninformed sources.

Which you described as very brief. Were you ever a full-time employee? I was. There's a lot more to be understood from the inside.

Funny, because my (full-time) experience, nor my additional two years as an adjunct, were not like that. Not once did I ever feel pressured to do anything to retain a student. And, considering that I was one of the people who would have applied that pressure, I can safely say I never did, nor did I ever hear any of my peers--campus chairs--do that, either.

Hopefully, people reading this will make distinctions between full-time observations from a verifiable source and an anonymous post about some self-described brief encounter.

I can't speak for other schools, but that wasn't the case at UoP. Not at all. Terminal and enabling objectives for each course were set by the school--an extremely common practice I experienced at other, not-for-profit schools (UoP was my only for-profit stint). However, content--readings, lectures, activities--to meet those objectives were left to the individual instructors. They were sometimes provided some support material, but no one required those materials be used.

It helps to actually understand how higher education is conducted.

More unverifiable anecdotes. They prove nothing on their own, and even less considering they're from an anonymous source. They might be true and they might be real, but there is no reason to think either of those things.