Will U of Arkansas buy U of Phoenix?!

Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound like getting into an Engineering Management program was a super difficult thing to do or one that required the accreditation. Just to say that an Engineering Technology degree is a perfectly fine degree for a career in "Engineering" (broad sense) and is unlikely to hold you back or relegate you permanently to a lower tier in terms of scope of work and salary. There are Physical Therapists whose highest degree is a bachelors who were licensed before the Masters became the norm. And today you can earn a bachelors in PT Assistant. Two people with the same level of degree but miles apart in terms of earnings because of where you fell along the degree inflation line graph.

Engineering is much hazier was my point. And if you added a degree in Engineering Management it is quite possible to work your way into some decent management level positions without even thinking about PE.

Part of it is also that there are so many related fields where a STEM degree can be swapped in very easily. Work in IT? They'll take you with an engineering (or engineering tech) degree if you have the skills. Our entire Data Science team are all engineers by training. And while one of our Project Management managers is referred to generally as "an engineer by training" his degree being in engineering tech hasn't affected any of that.

Are there paths, as you note, that will be a dead end? Yes, absolutely. If you are an Engineering Tech assigned to a team of Electrical Engineers, it's highly unlikely you're going to ever take over that team as a Tech. However, could you parlay that experience to become a manager of an engineering or engineering adjacent department? Sure. That isn't specific to engineering. That's just careers in general. An RN will never become Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at a hospital. But they have MANY options for leadership beyond just becoming a unit nurse or, eventually, Director of Nursing. The paths are not as linear as they once were. And, for senior level techs, the work they are doing can sometimes be indistinguishable from what an engineer is working on.

All of this to say...the degree, and its accreditation, has some strong potential value for Arkansas and I could see why this would potentially be such an attractive thing for them. Is it a substitute for an engineering degree? No. It was never intended to be. In fact, the whole thing made a lot more sense when Engineering Tech topped out at the associates level and more education meant a degree in engineering (it is pretty common to find engineers today who "worked their way up" to have that degree stack). But it's certainly a viable career path, one we have every bit the difficulty filling as non-specialized engineers and I have to imagine Arkansas is probably not too hard on the eyes on a resume.

 

Not just that, but where they are in terms of licensure.

 

The University of Phoenix can, as a measure of its attractiveness for sale, be evaluated in two ways. First, enrollments. Will the system enjoy even the now-diminished enrollments of UoP?

Second, they might want to leverage the instructional delivery methodology employed by UoP.

If neither, why would anyone want to buy it?

 

It looks like Grantham hasn't erased the University of Arkansas System's budget deficit. They're expecting that the $20 million licensing deal with University of Phoenix will put them into positive territory. I wouldn't be surprised if Grantham were to disappear in the next 5 to 10 years.

 

It's not really being bought; it's being transitioned to a non-profit. It's a licensing deal that can bring in $20 million per year. The University of Arkansas System is operating in the red, and they wouldn't have to spend their own funds to purchase University of Phoenix.

 

If that's the case, it might not happen. It's not very easy, mainly because owners need to be paid. How they structure that payoff will have an impact on the accreditor's acceptance of the deal. This is where Grand Canyon U. got tripped up when it tried to go to non-profit status.

 

Based on the articles shared in this thread, University of Arkansas is raising private money to form a non-profit organization that would purchase University of Phoenix. Grand Canyon formed its own non-profit and agreed to share 60% of its revenue with its former for-profit owner. In comparison, Purdue Global is only paying 12% of its revenue to Kaplan for educational services. Grand Canyon is non-profit for IRS purposes, but it is not considered a non-profit by the U.S. Department of Education.

 

I actually find myself split on this one. On the one hand, you're right, why should DOE get to decide "Nah, you're not non-profit enough despite that otherwise being a determination made by the IRS?"

On the other hand, sending 60% of your revenue back to your previous for-profit owner seems, as the kids would say, "sus."

But of course, I think the DOE hangup on for versus non profit is ridiculous in the first place. But if we're going to play that game we should probably play it with a reasonable measure of fairness.

 

I think it's well within their purview because tax dollars are being used for profits that don't go toward education or the operation of the school. They're going into shareholders' pockets. Grand Canyon is trying to get around rules for for-profit colleges by pretending to be non-profit. This doesn't help the stereotype that for-profit colleges are shady; Grand Canyon is reinforcing it.

The U.S. Department of Education's hangup isn't ideological; it's based on data. In general, for-profit colleges spend their funds differently, which is one of the reasons why they have worse outcomes. For-profit companies are beholden to their shareholders. It would be unethical for them to not consider their shareholders, but that also means that faculty, students, and educational facilities do not take priority.

 

That's how the for-profit sector operates. The free market only works when consumers are educated. For-profit colleges have an endless supply of recruits who know nothing about higher education and have no one to guide them. How do we think quacks get away with selling snake oil in the 21st century? They have plenty of uneducated people to sell to. Their treatments don't need to work.

 

Exceptions don't make the rule. Not all elderly drivers are the same, but some states still regulate them differently from other age groups. Middle-aged drivers also cause accidents, but we know that people's driving skills tend to decline in their senior years. When an entire sector hardly has any schools with similar or better outcomes to comparable non-profit schools, to me it makes sense to put more regulations on a sector that poses more risk. We're not talking about a minority of schools; the majority of for-profit schools are low quality. I don't know why it's so hard to accept that a company's business model and mission have a huge impact on how they market, who they market to, and how they allocate expenditures.

 

Some people have an emotional attachment to for-profit colleges either because they graduated from one or because they're Libertarian (and ironically avoided for-profits). This gets in the way of facts.

According to the report, just one in four for-profit schools are good enough to return what students pay with ten years. But at 69% of those schools, the breakeven point on initial investment is 25 years or more away. A shocking 63% of them deliver no net financial education benefit to poor students at all - ever.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2021/05/29/for-profit-colleges-continue-to-fail-poor-students/?sh=764fb03b6d69

 

Arkansas Board Rejects Deal With University of Phoenix

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/26/report-u-arkansas-system-may-buy-university-phoenix

 

Article with the update

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/institutions/profit-colleges/2023/04/25/arkansas-board-rejects-deal-university-phoenix