
Death of a Diploma Mill: University of Phoenix Going Down in Flames? - BillShakespeare
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/31/death-of-a-diploma-mill-university-of-phoenix-going-down-in-flames.html?via=mobile&source=twitter
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hwstar
Education and Healthcare: Two services which should not be offered by
businesses seeking to make a profit. I think future generations will look back
and ask: "What were they thinking?"

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alistproducer2
I've said the exact same thing many times! There are some things where profit
motive works against the best outcomes.

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alistproducer2
The article is off base though. You can't call a school with a 9% graduation
rate a diploma mill. Online school is hard. It takes a lot more self
discipline and motivation than traditional classes. I tended to avoid them in
school. I took Computer Organization II online and it was waaaay harder than
it would have been in person.

UoP is obviously ripping people off but it seems unfair to the people who
worked hard to get through the program to call the school a diploma mill when
the facts plainly do not support that. This is coming from a FSU alum so I
have no allegiance to UoP.

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jlgaddis
Is 9% UoP's overall graduation rate? According to TFA (and the DoE, where they
sourced the data), the online school's graduation rate was 7.3%.

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masters3d
ITT Tech is another company that only cares about money.

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jlgaddis
I don't remember what all of them are but I read an article a while back
talking about a number of for-profit schools. The fact that there are
accredited institutions that are publicly traded just seems wrong.

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ggchappell
The U of P may have some serious problems, but they are certainly not a
diploma mill.

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ggchappell
REPLY-AS-EDIT. Well, they're not. Really. They are accredited by the Higher
Learning Commission, indicating that they meet U.S. Dept. of Education
standards.

Having been through several similar accreditations at my own school (I'm a
C.S. professor at a more traditional university), I can say with some
confidence that the accreditation process is not a joke.

So, lots of accusations are made against U. of P. I don't know which of these
might be true. Maybe U. of P. is a collection of lying, manipulative thieves
who eat babies for breakfast; I couldn't say. But they do _not_ give away
meaningless diplomas to whomever is willing to pay the fees.

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kjs3
It's not even UoP that are the ones who need to be investigated the most. I
can't tell you how many times I've gotten a resume from a vet who got conned
out of his GI benefits for one of those "Certification Bootcamps" on the
promise that all they need is a cert and they're guaranteed a high paying IT
job.

