Death of a Diploma Mill: University of Phoenix Going Down in Flames? | Hacker News Reader

Death of a Diploma Mill: University of Phoenix Going Down in Flames?

thedailybeast.com

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?"

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

Just the fact that an accredited University is publicly traded is somewhat troubling to me.

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.

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%.

ITT Tech is another company that only cares about money.

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.

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

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.

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.

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