Gosh, GMU can’t be that bad! One of my friends has a degree from there and another was a professor there for years. Both are exceedingly smart, accomplished people.
I confess I am not sure what this pitting is of. Liberty and Prager? The incompleteness of the list of bad schools? (Which incidentally is 41 schools, not 63. Maybe Liberty and Prager would appear between 42 and 63!)
There are plenty of shitty, unethical schools out there for sure. My personal beef is with what were known (and probably still are) in Micronesia as “project schools.” These were mediocre-to-poor academically rated schools, typically in the American Northwest, who zeroed in on the fact that Micronesians are entitled to Pell grants as a result of the Compact of Free Association (a treaty between the US and three Micronesian nations).
They therefore directed a lot of marketing efforts at wooing Micronesians so they could get a big slice of the Pell money.
I am not automatically against this; hey, schools need money to servive, and if they have found a decent market niche, good for them. But they are morally obligated to provide proper services, then. In my view all “project schools” should have first-rate support services, including ESL classes specifically formulated for native speakers of Austronesian languages, and social/psychological support activities targeted expressly at the Micronesian communities on campus.
Alas, when I lived in Micronesia - admittedly many years ago - at least some of these schools were not helping the students they wooed to attend. There were a number of suicides by young people who went to the US unprepared and couldn’t handle the stress. Not to say the schools were always entirely to blame, but it was pretty clear they were not stepping up the way the should have.
My undergraduate degree is from the University of Pittsburgh. I received an excellent education. However, (there’s always a however) I graduated with a few individuals who, while excelling in their $port, were barely literate and should not have received any degree. Disturbingly high graduation rates are just as bad as disturbingly low rates.
Many of these schools are HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), art schools, and a few that are also aimed at Native American students.
I don’t know about Liberty, but PragerU isn’t even an actual university. It’s an advocacy group that produces online media and (right wing) K-12 teaching materials. You can’t graduate from there.
The Prager University Foundation , known as PragerU , is an American 501(c)(3)nonprofitadvocacy group and media organization that creates content promoting conservative and capitalist viewpoints on various political, economic, and sociological topics. It was co-founded in 2009 by Allen Estrin and talk show host Dennis Prager. Despite the name including the word “university”, it is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
I didn’t look at the link, but Johnson & Wales used to offer lots of certificate programs that students in majors would complete, then leave without finishing the major.
I’m finding it hard to see that degree not get laughed out of a room, unless in extremely niche markets.
Mainly Liberty and Prager’s absence on a list, which, it must be said, is garnering less and less regard from me. (ha! the count! yeah, just a bit off)
I don’t know what to tell you, but that just not the case, at least in the business and legal realms that I’m familiar with…Again, it’s not doing you any favors either, but it just doesn’t stand out one way or the other with respect to the quality of the education you receive.
Fair enough; acknowledged.
Unrelated, out of curiosity, I took a boo at their website and on the first page, I wasn’t too enchanted with “Training Champions For Christ” being one of the most prominent things stated there.
I was thinking more about their hosting of the Mercatus Center, the best libertarian think tank that the Koch brothers can buy.
But, in general, GMU is your basic public liberal-arts school that happens to be in close proximity to the national seat of political power, which makes some parts of it… attractive?.. to people trying to influence the polticians in that seat.
I mean, I’m totally not knocking this concept of an institutional “economic score” for prospective students whose sole or primary criterion for higher education is simply maximizing profitability. Many people only want or need a college degree to allow them to earn the most money possible while costing them as little as possible in tuition and fees. Nothing wrong with that.
But to equate this criterion with a university being “good” or “bad” or “better” or “worse” in any broader sense is simply marketing bullshit.
This is clearly an AI-written or AI-guided article that’s popular in search results these days. It takes forever to get to the point and uses some very repetitive language. It just dredged some list of graduation rates and “economic scores” to generate it, and it’s only as comprehensive as the source data, which may not poll every university anyway.