Just a few points:
[list][li]University of Phoenix is one of the schools with in-person classes on the US military bases overseas. They cannot do that without accreditation.[/li][li]It doesn’t matter if people you’ve met “don’t have a lot of respect for the degree” or not; what matters is that it is accredited.[/li][/QUOTE]
But they’re not accredited at the level that matters.
As I pointed out upthread in this zombie, you can’t just lump everything into two categories of “Accredited” and “Not Accredited”.
There are regional accreditations. There are ones such as “Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP)” that basically mean that yes, it’s a real school, but it’s not a good school.
The good schools have AACSB accreditation and you won’t ever find Phoenix on that list. If you’re getting an MBA you can pick from plenty of high end schools like Harvard and plenty of cheaper state schools like UMass that are on that list. Picking Phoenix is a bad choice.
I am in Human Resources and one of the tasks I perform for my company is oversight of the educational reimbursement program. For several reasons, we have removed U of P from the list of institutions for which we will reimburse tuition and books costs.
1 - There is a wide degree of dissimilarity in what is taught under the name of a specific course. What I mean by that is if you take Engl Comp I at one Phoenix location, it may differ significantly from that same course taken at another location or online. In some cases, you may get a really comprehensive course. In others, it’s a sign-your-name-get-an-A arrangement.
2 - They offer too many credits for life experience. We had a secretary who was offered 12 hours of business management credit for achievements she’d supposedly earned in her job. She’s an excellent employee and very bright, but she is not doing any management tasks whatsoever. We found that, and other similar instances, to be suspect. Other students were offered public speaking course credit because they occasionally spoke (not presented, just spoke) at meetings.
3 - U of P is quite expensive. Students were averaging $1,500 and up in tuition costs alone. Books added another several hundred dollars in many cases.
We have partnered with several universities that offer online programs with a much greater degree of rigor, more consistency in coursework and who have per credit hour costs around $200-$250 per credit hour. In the example of the public speaking course above, we now have students who are required to give actual speeches in front of at least five of our staff members, which are videotaped and sent to the instructor to grade. The audience is also vetted prior to serving as the official audience and is asked to complete an evaluation of the speech.
As you can see, all the difference in the world.
But as others have said, that’s if you want your people to have an actual education. If you want them to just get a diploma, U of P is fine.
We’ve been very happy with the results. Our student-employees are working harder and getting a better quality of education.
This whole discussion reminds me of how misguided the whole idea of “You get a degree to get a job” is. With a few exceptions such as engineers, nurses, lawyers and teachers where the accreditation is a requirement for the job a lot of people who have obtained post secondary education don’t work in that field. Cite.
What a post secondary education should do is give you the critical thinking skills and organizational skillsets to do ANY job with a modicum of success.
I have a B.Sc. General that I obtained primarily by Distance Ed because I was in the military and raising my family no where near a major University not because it was relevant to my job but because I wanted to learn about geology and physics, my primary focus. The downside was I couldn’t get a Geology or Physics Major due to the structure of some of the courses in the curriculum; no labs, no major. If a proper curriculum was built on the premise of doing your own experiments, you’d have a better education.
As to a liberal arts degree, you might sneer at it but you may want to read this first.
Someone with a U of P degree would not make it through our doors for an interview. If someone snuck them in and tried to make an offer, it wouldn’t go through. And the person making it would bet a nasty email from HR.
There’s a lot of space between “not an automatic disqualification,” and “appropriate qualification for further study.” “They did NOT tell me NO!!!” is an (overly excited) restatement of the first, but let’s take a closer look at the program that you’re ostensibly qualified for. From the program FAQ here:
Does a U of P degree show that a student is equipped to handle the graduate level of study? Does it indicate that the student is at an equally high caliber to his/her peers who will be admitted to USC’s program? Does it exhibit an enthusiasm for learning and a drive to succeed?
I don’t know anything about the social sciences, nor do I know the answers to those questions (even if I have my suspicions). I am, though, a university faculty member in the physical sciences, and I would not accept a graduate student with a University of Phoenix degree. So far as I know, none of my colleagues would either. The student’s application would be clearly missing letters of recommendation from researchers - not just professors who’ve had this student in a class, but people who can assess the student’s potential as a future researcher. I don’t know any active researchers in my field who teach at U of P, and without that aspect to it, it’s not an environment that prepares somebody for graduate study.
I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that brick and mortar schools were way behind in giving online courses. That is no longer the case. Now you can be enrolled at many established schools and be able to work full time.
It use to be that it mattered where you got your college degree from. It was required you have one just to get an interview with a company.
Then companies didn’t seem to care as long as you got one. Then they have moved to not really caring so much if you have a degree or not (unless it’s a real requirement like the medical field). At this point, few employers will give you a job or a promotion merely because you got a degree or second degree for that reason alone. In 2015, they seem to be far more concerned with work experience and having the right skills they require for the job. If you already have a degree, and it’s something expected by all the people they hire for a specific kind of job, then it’s to your credit to have one. But the degree by itself in 2015 is not likely going to have direct value to an employer.
Does it matter where you got the degree even if it’s online? I don’t believe government jobs care if you got your masters online or not as long as it was accredited. For everyone else, much of their identify belongs to where they go their degree, the location, how well known the school is and more importantly does this make you have anything in common with the person doing the hiring. Say you went to some State college someplace, and the hiring manager also went there and is a big supporter of the State college. He or she is going to identify better with the job candidate. “Oh, so you want to State. What dorm did you live in? Oh, is that pizza place still there?”.
If you said you got your degree from XYZ online university, I don’t know if that’s going to connect with a hiring manager as much or at all unless they got one there too. If the online colleges had some great reputation in teaching the latest thing that’s in demand faster/better than the State college, in this example, then it would be to your advantage.
I was curious a while ago and looked at prices and online degrees aren’t cheap, it made me wonder why people just didn’t go to school part-time. Although I do understand there are advantages to not having to travel.
I think if you need to do distance learning, it might be better to get one from a college who already has a a good reputation as a brick and mortar college, but take the courses offered as distance learning.
All because you don’t like the school? I’m not sure but it seems to me that one of your workers or applicants may, in the future, be able to file a grievance against you for that.
On what grounds? Nobody’s going to object if I hire or promote the applicant with a Harvard degree over the guy from Compass Point State University; why would they have a problem with me hiring the candidate from Compass Point State over the University of Phoenix?
If there’s an automatic promotion that’s supposed to come with a completed degree, that’s one thing… but then the decision wouldn’t be Ruken’s hands.
This may be a shock to you, but a manager doesn’t have to be honest when you ask him or her why you weren’t picked for a job.
And anyway, there are only a few areas that employers aren’t allowed to make decisions on. Gender, race, ethnicity, religion are the biggest ones. Pretty much everything else is fair game.
What planet are you guys on that jobs- even “government jobs”- are not particularly competitive and just require the right combinations of checked boxes? Every hiring decision I’ve seen involved people reading and evaluating resumes, including education info.
There are some positions where pay scales or automatic promotions are a “check the box” kind of thing. And on government contracts the requirement from the government side can be a check-the-box kind of thing. But whoever holds the contract and actually does the hiring is still running a competitive process with a full evaluation.
In the (state) government agency where I used to work, for certain jobs lack of a degree was an automatic disqualifier. If you had a degree, you had at least a chance of getting an interview and the opportunity to explain how your previous work experience, etc., made you a good fit. No degree = no interview = no chance. It’s not that the degree would get you the job, but that the lack of a degree insured you didn’t.
(Back when I had some slight involvement in hiring there, online education was still relatively novel, and UoP just wasn’t on the radar.)
All because the manager doesn’t consider the school sufficiently rigorous or considers the school to turn out graduates who are not prepared for the job. Those are perfectly legal reasons to turn somebody down, so what would be the grounds for a grievance?
That was exactly the case with the only person I know who got a UoP degree. He had to check a box to get promoted and the higher ups already wanted him - he was on the inside track as far as they were concerned. He cared not a whit about the academic rigor or learning much, he just wanted that check mark and he got some degree of tuition refund for it. So UoP at the time was the quickest, easiest ( but certainly not the cheapest ) way to check that box while he worked full time. He got his piece of paper, he did indeed get promoted to the position he wanted and he will retire out of that position, never having advanced beyond it.
If you are someone in that exact situation or something very close to it, it is a logical enough proposition. If you aren’t I really don’t think it is worth it. Deserved or not, the stigma attached to the institution is real enough. Spending that kind of dough for something that might not be of any help or actually competitively detrimental to getting a job just isn’t worth it.