29/01 Online Education Database Ranks UOP 25 of 41

Online Education Database released their latest online college rankings for 2008. This ranking puts University of Phoenix at 25 out of 41. This is definitely not a flattering rating, but I do not know enough about the other colleges to make an honest assessment of UOP’s ranks relative to other schools.

While I agree that UOP's place is probably in the bottom half of this list, I can't agree as to the validity of the methodology of this ranking. This ranking attempts to convert certain University attributes into numbers and then averages them together. Thankfully, they included their data such that we can take a close look at how they arrived at their rankings.

The rankings take into account acceptance rate, percent of students receiving financial aid, graduation rate, peer web citations (number of backlinks to the University's website), retention rate, scholarly citations (as found by Google Scholar, student-faculty ratio, and number of years accredited. The rankings weigh all criteria equally, which I believe is the first problem with this list. The really important criteria are the graduation rate, retention rate, and student-faculty ratio, as these are attributes that are very indicative of a school's quality and performance, yet they are given the same weight as other less important criteria. I'm just not convinced that the number of students receiving financial aid at a given school is an indication as to the quality of education, educational experience, or respect for the University. Most importantly I don’t think this is an important consideration for potential students other than their personal ability to obtain financial aid. I believe that potential students should consider all other factors first, and then look into the availability of financial aid once the student has narrowed his choices. Students not using financial aid will have little interest in this attribute, so it is unfair to increase or lower a school’s ranking because of this.

Similarly, I fail to see the importance of the number of backlinks to a school's website. A link to the school indicates conversation or discussion about the school, but that discussion is not necessarily good. The number of links may also be a direct result of how extensively the school is marketing itself online, the size of the marketing budget, or the propensity of the school to end up in newspaper headlines, and the age of the school. Again, I don’t think these are reasons to judge a school as better or worse than another.

Finally, the number of scholarly citations is another poor measure of a school as this is almost certainly going to be a function of a school’s size and age. I'm not convinced that a school's size or age, whether large or small, old or new, can be used to designate a school as better or worse than another.

In summary, this is a valiant attempt to objectify school properties in order to rank them based on facts and data. Unfortunately, this approach falls short due to inherent weaknesses in the model. This isn’t to say there isn’t some merit to the concept. I think that using other criteria that I believe students value more would be more useful and lead to more meaningful results. Such criteria might be average salary of graduates relative to national averages. Other good criteria might be some kind of an HR survey. Such measures would introduce a great degree of complexity and cost into such rankings, but the results would be far more useful. Beyond personal preference items (location, degrees offered, etc.), I believe that the following are the most important factors to be considered for rankings:

• Regional Accreditation
  
• Program Accreditation
  
• Respect for the degree by industry
  
• Cost per credit hour
  
• Acceptance Rate
  
• Graduation Rate
  
• Placement Rate
  
• Student-Faculty Ratio
  

If someone can compile a weighted list with the above criteria, that list would be one worth taking seriously.

01/01 For Profit vs. Non-Profit Education

Perhaps the biggest problem with for-profit education is the contradiction in the mission of the business compared to the purpose of the business. For UOP, the purpose is to make money, but their mission is to provide education. These goals are at odds with each other because the higher the standards upheld, the lower the revenue. That is, if you restrict enrollment by applying admissions standards, you reduce the size of your market and the amount of possible revenue from students who don’t qualify. Similarly, if you uphold academic standards and give out failing grades for substandard work, the drop-out rate increases and you will see lower revenue. Lower revenue doesn’t do much to serve the purpose of having a company, particularly one that is expected to grow as fast as possible because of expectations from Wall Street.

With UOP's for-profit education model, there is an almost unlimited capacity, you can never have enough students. As a result you seek to enroll anyone that you can. Contrast to a typical non-profit public or private University with limited capacity, there are typically more student applicants than they have capacity for. When demand is greater than supply, these schools can (and do) pick only the best applicants. This serves to increase the quality of the institution because a school can only be as good as the students that go there. When you enroll anyone and everyone, quality is naturally going to suffer.

This isn’t an attack on for-profit education as a concept. I believe that it is possible to run a great school and make a tidy profit; however, the quest for profits must be secondary to the service offered. With any business, if you take care of the customers and offer a good product or service, the profits will come. The key to offering a good for-profit education is exclusivity and quality. There are two things that are certain: A) People are willing to pay for quality and B) People want only the best. If you can offer a great education, it doesn't matter if you make profit or not. To take it a bit further though, some people are willing to sacrifice quality for ease and convenience. This is where UOP lies.

Because of this, UOP is very popular. When it comes to education people will make sacrifices because of their personal situation, finances, or the perception that an education from a particular school is adequate (as opposed to ideal) for their purposes. We also know that people will pay for convenience. Admitedly, UOP has the convenience aspect nailed. Getting a degree at UOP is as convenient as you can get and requires considerably less time devotion than most any other school. UOP's extensive marketing also helps portray an image of acceptability and legitimacy. With these two advantages, UOP has no problem keeping up enrollment. When it comes down to it, students (more than anything else) are concerned with obtaining desirable employment and career advancement with their degree. It is easy for a University to make these claims, but difficult prove, and UOP takes advantage of this (although there are ever increasing Internet resources by which a student can research these things, such as http://uopsucks.com/earnless.html).

An obvious path to success for any kind of school is hiring only the best teachers and enrolling only the most qualified students. The problem is that this concept doesn’t translate easily to a massive scale. In the end, if a graduate can walk straight into a high paying, respectable position when they graduate (just as they do at the most prestigious non-profit schools), students will be thrilled, word will spread, and the school will be successful and profitable. But by the very nature that such schools employ and enroll only the best, such a school would almost certainly have to be smaller and have a higher overhead. To compensate, any school with such a great reputation should easily be able to charge even more and maintain attractive profit margins. The key is indeed to maintain the quality of the educational experience, and let the school grow naturally while maintaining high standards.

In conclusion, I believe the key to offering a quality for-profit education is in keeping the company private and limited to just a handful of owners/investors who truly believe in offering a quality education. Such a school wouldn't thrill Wall Street, but it would be wildly successful. The problems come in when there is excessive pressure to grow the bottom line. With a small group of individuals with clear goals and plans, it's easy to keep things on track. With Wall Street watching everything you do and with big incentive bonuses and lucrative stock options for executives, goals and plans change very quickly - and not for the better. The other key is slow, managed growth. When you grow as large and as fast as the University of Phoenix has, it is easy to lose perspective and compromise on morals and integrity, which we have definitely seen.

20/12 What is Regional Accreditation?

In my experience running this site and even before, I encountered many people who talked about school's accreditation as if the accreditation badge were an indication of quality. I must admit that I had no idea either, I had always just been told to "make sure that the school you go to is accredited." I suspect that most people have been told the same.

University of Phoenix is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission and is a member of the North Central Association (for additional information, visit www.ncahlc.org). Their guidelines for accreditation are available at http://www.ncahlc.org/download/Overview07.pdf

I suspect that UOP banks on this general ignorance of accreditation to sell itself to prospective students. They can truthfully claim that they have the same accreditation as other prestigious Universities. But what does it really mean? Not as much as you might think.

The regional accreditation guidelines establish guidelines for determining if an institution is worthy of accreditation. They more-or-less outline a minimum set of standards by which to evaluate institutions that apply for membership. To say that a school is accredited is to say that they meet the guidelines.

From the big picture, the accreditation means that a school meets a certain set of minium criteria. It doesn't matter if a school barely meets the requirements or greatly exceeds them; both are accredited just the same. It is really no different than a driver's license. Both a 90 year-old grandma and Mario Andretti (Famous Formula 1 Driver) have a driver's license, but one's skills and ability far exceeds the other. Clearly, if 90 year-old grandma has a driver's license, then the mere possession of a driver's license is no indication of the quality of driver. Similarly, as we will find out, having regional accreditation is no indication of the quality of school.

So what is in the regional accreditation guidelines? I suggest you take a few minutes and read them for yourself. You'll see that the guidelines are generally vague, non-specific, and qualitative rather than quantitative. You'll also see that there is no academic review of specific degree programs or program content or quality!. That's right! The bulk of the guidelines merely establish that a school has all of the mechanisms in place to be a legitimate school. That is, the guidelines ensure that a school has faculty, administration, curriculum, policies, procedures, plans, and on and on. From what I can tell, the evaluation is just deep enough to determine that a school legitimately trying to be a place of learning instead of a mail-order diploma sales office. It was obvious from my interpretation of the guidelines that it would be possible to gain accreditation by setting up a shell of a school and hand out diplomas so long as the students were required to do work and attend classes led by "qualified" people. Clearly, regional accreditation doesn't mean much.

What most people fail to realize is that there is a more important accreditation that is critical to the recognition and reputation of a school and the quality of its graduates. This is the purpose of program accreditation. It is vital when selecting a school that the program of study you chose is accredited by a well known accrediting organization! For business, this would be AACSB, for engineering this would be ABET, for education, this would be NCATE, and on and on. These organizations closely examine degree program content and quality and are a true symbol of quality. It is important to note that UOP is not accredited by any of these organizations!

Conclusion:
All schools you consider should be definitely regionally accredited as a school that cannot meet those minimum requirements would be dubious indeed. However, it is critical that you look beyond the regional accreditation and make sure that the program you are enrolling into has PROGRAM accreditation. If the school has program accreditation, be sure to investigate thoroughly. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to go to that organization's website and look the list of accredited institutions. Are there prestigious or well-known schools on that list? If so, then you can bet the accreditation is a good one to look for. The other way to check accreditation would be to go to a prestigious school's website and find out who they are accredited by (i.e., check out who accredits Stanford if you are interested in an MBA). Be aware that some schools are over-ambitious when it comes to accreditation and may be accredited by multiple agencies. Be sure to dig deeper and find out which one is better.

Be careful! Schools may be members of accrediting organizations even though they are not accredited. Be sure to check that a school is actually accredited, NOT just a member!