How Kaplan, Strayer and Phoenix are taking us all to the cleaners.
Here is a great read from Gin and Tacos about the online universities and how they are hoovers for federal education loan dollars while not giving much value to the students.
http://www.ginandtacos.com/2014/03/19/stunning/
"Half – HALF! – of all loan defaults come from the 13% of students at for-profits. The dirty secret throughout this boom is that the Phoenixes and Kaplans and Strayers are really, staggeringly bad at educating students. I don't mean that only in the "online classes are terrible" sense (although god knows they are) but in terms of basic measures like student retention, graduation rates, and post-graduation success. When 20% of your students are graduating compared to 55% across all public universities and nearly two-thirds at privates, you're barely a university.."
The real universities that can effectively educate students are failing to compete with these sleazeballs for the nontraditional student. In Ohio, we have a wonderful system of branch campuses from the public universities that give tremendous value for the education dollar. Unfortunately, because of budget cutting by our GOP overlords and the push to save money by using mostly adjunct faculty, these schools are not as good as they used to be. Due the budget cutting, the branch campuses are not extending their offerings to the nontraditional students the ways that would be most useful. They are still vastly better than the online crap universities, though. Not criticizing adjunct faculty, they do yeoman's work. The problem with adjuncts is that they are so abused, underpaid and overworked that they do not have the time to spend to build a good campus culture like full time faculty can.
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