Not exactly. They include the specific cost of books, dorm and meal plans.
Or off-campus apartment, or living with relatives, etc. Which is why, when comparing tuition costs, it’s more useful to compare the tuition costs. My cite says tuition at a UC is $12,240. Your site says the tuition for UCLA is $12,918. So they are in agreement.
I’m just curious…do diploma mills actually conduct classes? If so, what do they teach? Is it just True University Light, or what?
It varies. There are places that pretty patently just sell you a piece of paper with some transcripts. There are others that give credit for “life experience” and so in theory you write some essays about your abilities and they award a piece of paper that says you did.
Then there are ones that have some fourth-rate accreditation from a bureau that exists pretty much to collect fees from fifth-rate “schools” - Nova University in SoCal used to be one of these, and teachers would go attend about six weeks of classes in the summer to get worthless M.A.'s and even Ph.D.'s. They were beyond worthless EXCEPT that they just barely qualified for step-up salaries in many districts. Smart ones got their Ph(ake) D(egree), tossed it in a drawer, never mentioned it again, and collected as much as 50% more salary. (Then again, I had a community college professor who posted hers on the wall and insisted on being addressed as Doctor…)
And then you get to Phoenix and National and the others that try to straddle the wide fence between respectability and worth and handing out “B’s for fees.” They specialize in night school and now remote classes for working professionals tacking on degrees. I suppose there’s some value in adding a two-year degree in a particular subfield, maybe, but I know from a number of people it’s almost as easy to skate through, unimpaired by new knowledge, so I’d put these degrees right in the same drawer as Nova. But you see them on the wall all the time.
And there are a few first-rank universities that have programs for working pros that adapt the flexibility and class structure of the fakers to real learning. Mrs. B. is attempting slow cerebral suicide in a doctoral program from a major northeast university; she has two long remote classes a week, two days a month on-campus and a workload that would crush most undergrads.
Missed edit: National and Phoenix and others in that range are the ones who tend to trumpet that they don’t waste students’ time with “irrelevant classes.” But they insist on being called “colleges” and not “trade schools” anyway.
Which would be good, but that need would be better served by a good Higher Technical course than by a poor Higher Academic degree.
Part of the problem is that what back in our youths was a Mail Order Course in TV Repair is now supposed to be an Online Bachelor’s in Electronics Technology, sold at Bachelor’s price.
**Amateur Barbarian **pretty much covered it. The true diploma mill programs where you just paid for a bogus degree had become less prevalent mostly due to higher sophistication of employers (“Last April I told you that promotion and pay raise required a Master’s, and here’s August and now you have one?”), but their replacements are if anything more insidious because they now don’t just go for those tacking on credentials, but entice people who DO want a Higher Ed (or have been persuaded they do) but have no idea what a real one is supposed to look and sound like.
In some of the for-profit schools it’s not much worse than a low-tier nonprofit school; in some it’s just go-thru-the-motions, teach-the-test but at least the class IS about the specific skill you will be testing for; in yet others it’s just “complete this list of assignments and it’s a Pass” w/o even dealing with whether or not you completed them *well *or the list really proves you know anything.
In the worst the true goal is to keep you enrolled until they max out your elegibility for grants and loans.
And he touches on how one of the key elements in telling “real” (not necessarily good, mind you) programs is what’s the Accrediting Authority; essentially the Big Regionals – Middle States Commission, New England Association, (North Central) Higher Learning Commission, Northwest Commission, Southern Association, Western Association, Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges – are the top standard for academic-degree schools and it means that school’s classes and degrees are more likely to be recognized and transferrable when applying to other legit schools for transfer or grad work.
No. You claimed that was how much it cost to go to school for a year as a resident…and you left out many other related costs. And, officially, there is no tuition at a UC. The 12 grand is a registration fee that pays for things like recreation facilities and student groups.
Actually its tuition + reg fees. But over half of undergrads pay no tuition.
Madsircool, I think you’re being overly pedantic (even for this board!) on what constitutes the cost of going to school. The cost of tuition and fees, and not living expenses, is a perfectly fine metric to use as long as one is comparing apples to apples.
The costs generally discussed in this thread have been primarily about how much the schools costs, excluding living expenses. I think it would be misleading to include dorm and meal plan costs for the public colleges discussed, but obviously those charges aren’t applicable to the vast majority of for-profit college students. The insistence that living expenses be included in the cost of public universities, yet the numbers discussed for fees at for-profit colleges will obviously not include living expsenss, would lead to a severely misleading representation.
And on the other topic, I’ve heard a figure that 72% of for-profit college graduates make the same money as high school dropouts. I guess there’s some disagreement on how those salaries are calculated, but boy does that factoid stick in my mind.
Frontline documentary on for-profit universities.
It’s very educational.