Back to School?

 

When you’re underemployed and unhappy it’s only natural to look for ways to change your situation. After enough subpar jobs, asshole supervisors, and coffee breaks spent staring out the window sighing, you get hungry to move forward and find a career worthy of your skills. Many underemployed workers see returning to school as the best path forward. It can be. However, it can also lead to misery, especially if you do it wrong.

There are multiple ways to go back to school. You can go to a vocational school to get certified in a particular field like auto mechanic or dental hygienist. You can go to your local community college and pick up an AA degree. You can go to a four year state university. For most full time workers, the easiest option is a for profit college.

 

Given a choice, most returning students would prefer a state university. They’re known entities with established reputations, but numerous obstacles prevent this from happening except in rare cases. The obstacles start with this: most state university courses are run during the daytime. There’s also the matter of length of time it takes to get a degree from a state university. Four years at the bare minimum. Alternatively, for profit universities offer easy scheduling, faster tracks to obtaining a degree, and online courses. This is far more compatible with most worker’s schedules. The convenience offered by for profit schools are a huge plus for full time employees. Given this fact, it’s understandable how these colleges successfully recruit so many students.

I went back to school at a for profit university while I was working full time. It was an interesting experience, and I learned quite a bit. Unfortunately, very little of it came from the courses I took. Follow me to the next paragraph and I’ll explain in more detail.

Hi, thanks for joining me here in the next paragraph. I’m glad you made it safely. I was about to give you my observations from my time attending the University of Phoenix. Before I do though, it’s important to discuss how the University of Phoenix (now shortened to UoP for the rest of this post) makes money. The profit, in “for profit” university. UoP’s chief concern is recruiting as many students as they can. That’s due to the way funding usually works for these colleges. Few UoP students can afford to pay tuition and books on their own, so most turn to federally funded loans. The bulk of these loans are known as Stafford loans.

Stafford loans are low interest loans. Additionally, all interest is deferred along with loan repayments until the student graduates or leaves. They’re ideal for students who couldn’t go to school without financial aid, and they’re generally easy to get, unless the applicant already has outstanding student loans. These loans go directly to the for profit school, not to the student, except in rare occasions. So more students, more money for UoP. This wouldn’t be as big a problem if the classes and books weren’t offensively expensive, and if the degrees were coveted, which they are certainly not. And there’s the problem.

There’s a term for colleges that hand out diplomas like Chipotle hands out excruciating stomach pain. That term is “diploma mills,” and that’s exactly what these for profit universities are. I can speak from experience on both topics unfortunately. For the UoP, the quality of their classes and the future of their students is way down on the universities list of concerns. In fact, it’s not really a concern at all. It’s only something they have to pretend to care about. At the top of the UoP’s list of priorities is student recruiting. It’s all about admissions baby. Reel those fish in. Promise them everything and deliver nothing.

The business model for UoP is brilliant in its simplicity. UoP and most for profit universities use a model known as accelerated learning for their courses. With accelerated learning there are no semesters or regular breaks. It’s just an endless succession of classes. Undergraduate and graduate degrees take on average about two and a half years. Much quicker than the four to five years a normal degree takes to accomplish. Their courses are usually five weeks long and then you’re onto the next class. The benefit for the student is they get their degree in a relatively quick time span. The benefit for the school is they keep students rolling in every five weeks or so, and keep the federal dollars flowing like honey. Brilliant.

Besides convenient scheduling and quicker paths to graduation, another of UoP’s chief selling points is that­ professors who teach there are current practitioners in their fields. Also, for students in a graduate program there isn’t a pretest qualifier like the GRE. When you haven’t attended school for a lot of years those pretest qualifiers are hard to score well on, and they do make a difference where you’ll be admitted. So if you already have an undergraduate degree and apply to UoP, then you’re in no questions asked. Just like if you’re E.coli, you’re in Chipotle’s “food.” No questions asked there either.

So why am I against UoP, and why do I think they’re a corrosive, misleading, and ultimately disastrous institution? I’m glad I asked. I’ll start with what I experienced. Good old anecdotal evidence coming at ya.

In 1999 I was working full time for Airtouch Cellular as a customer service supervisor. I decided to return to school to compete for better jobs with peers who had more than one degree. I chose UoP because they offered an accredited MBA program. I had a BA in English, but wanted a solid business degree. I thought the combination of the two degrees would be an invaluable tool in any path forward career wise.

I didn’t have time to go to a standard university because of my work schedule. In 1999, the idea of getting an advanced degree from a for profit university didn’t have the baggage it carries today. They were relatively new on the scene, and they were physical schools you had to go to. Online learning was only in its infancy in 1999.

I spoke with UoP students who worked with me, and they vouched for the school’s difficulty. Some even dropped out because they said it was too hard. Also, I was fortunate: my company paid 100% tuition reimbursement. The risk was minimal for me.

When I began at UoP I was determined and focused. I worked long hours reading and finishing assignments for each week’s class. I kept up with my workload, and leaned on peers in my study group. My life was centered around getting my degree. In the beginning, even with the rapid pace of the classes, I felt good about my decision to enroll there.

Things changed around my fifth course, which was on the internal mechanics of computers. I was completely lost. I wasn’t a kid who grew up with today’s technology at my fingertips. As an adult, I didn’t even get on the internet until late 1997. I was lost, to put it mildly. Completely and utterly lost.

Even with tech savvy group partners trying to bring me up to speed, I just couldn’t get it. I received a B in the course, even though I knew little more at the end than when I started. Until that computer course I’d seen other students flail badly and still move on to the next class. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it at the time, but after it happened to me, I took more notice of the school’s lax grading system.

I started asking questions as I advanced, and some professors outright admitted they’d pass students no matter what. I was told it was university protocol. If a professor was failing students, he would soon be out of a job. One professor told us not to worry about the complicated subject he was teaching us, Statistical Analysis. He acknowledged he could never teach the subject matter in any meaningful way in a month and a half. He told us if we got a job down the road where we needed the skill he was paid to teach, we should call him, and he could walk us through it. Neat! Thanks teach.

So there it was. Spoken from the professors themselves. UoP teachers weren’t grading students fairly or they’d be fired. UoP is a for profit business and students who fail or drop out are not good for business or profit. Integrity and ethics? Who needs that? Not UoP. or sadly, their teachers.

One would think I’d have dropped out by now, but I didn’t. I just recommitted myself to studying harder so I’d understand the courses as they grew more complex. Unfortunately, my extra studying didn’t make any difference. A year and a half in to my MBA program I began to panic. Classes came and went without me comprehending the subjects I was supposedly being taught to use in real life situations. The quick pace of UoP made it impossible to grasp difficult sophisticated material. It caused me a lot of anguish. My degree was important to me for the knowledge I wanted to acquire, not just for the piece of paper.

I was about a year from graduating when I forced myself to see the truth of my higher education. I might get an MBA, but I wasn’t going to have the knowledge most businesses would expect from an MBA graduate. I finally decided to leave school a mere five classes shy of getting my degree. I owed around $10,000 on my student loan and nothing substantial to show for it. Well substantial debt I guess, though my $10,000 looks like chump change compared with today’s holders of student loan debt.

So what did I learn from my experience? Well, I now know accelerated courses are a joke. You can’t learn in five weeks what other students are learning in ten or more weeks. Graduate courses are often highly technical and strenuous versions of the undergrad courses. Try taking Advanced Accounting in five weeks. Even students who get twice the amount of time struggle with the material. That fact is why so many employers refuse to take for profit university graduate degrees seriously. They see those degrees as empty, weightless, and devoid of seriousness.

Here’s the sad truth for UoP students: they invest their hopes and dreams in to getting a degree. They study hard, forsake a social life, and struggle to learn the material class after class. At the end of their efforts; the efforts that took years of dedicated focus, they get something most employers treat dismissively. On top of that indignity, students are usually left with a sizable student loan debt as well. Debt that is not dischargeable through bankruptcy.

It’s a bleak scenario. UoP students, through no fault of their own, are victims of a big lie society tells us; get a degree, and you’ll get a better job. It’s simply not true anymore. Even a good degree from a more respected school isn’t a guarantee of getting a good job anymore. Now imagine how low on the totem pole a UoP degree is. Yeah, just like I said, bleak.

Since my experience at UoP I’ve made it my personal duty to try to talk people out of going there if they tell me they’re considering it. If you’re reading this and are one of them, I hope you’ll take this post to heart. If I’ve prevented at least one person from going to UoP, I’ll consider this post a success. Additionally, if I’ve also convinced at least one person from ever eating at Chipotle, then I’ll consider myself a saver of human life as well.