Walden's Tempo Learning

This was my experience at the University of Phoenix. It admitted a lot of people who did not--or could not--proceed to graduation. But for those that did, they earned a real degree with real rigor.

The problem with that is whether it is responsible to admit people who likely cannot finish. (If such a determination can be made with reasonable accuracy?) When I was at UoP, the break-even number of courses after admission was 4. For those not familiar with this business term, it meant that the profits from a student taking a course add up to cover the variable costs of recruiting him/her and teaching him/her (as opposed to fixed costs that would be incurred anyway) successfully cover that margin in 4 courses. It was no coincidence that, when UoP decided to begin recruiting students with zero college experience, they implemented a "bridge" set of courses that counted towards the degree, but was largely designed to prepare students to do college-level work. How many courses in that set of hard-to-fail courses? Five. Very convenient.

 

I think the answer to that is in another thread. The thread about the 191 million dollar settlement that Phoenix has to pay. I'm not sure that there's anything similar going on with Walden.