Quick Takes: Race Classification Plan Questioned, Online Video of Berkeley Courses, Ignorance of History, U. of Phoenix Buys Stadium Naming Rights, $280M for Medical Research at Duke, Challenge of Title IX Lives (Faintly)

U of Phoenix

Gotta hand it to U of Phoenix marketing people. Is it a university or a virtual outfit that tries to sell degrees at Wal-Mart prices, or is it a new way using the tools of the Internet and computers to give some that step needed for that next more professional job? How to establish credentialling without peer review or as an earlier article points out, without your graduates knowing much more than... You finish the sentence. How about a good ole college football game in our stadium? U of Phoenix will next get football players on a team yet to be designed and built. Are they a college? Do you have to have students on a campus to constitute college?Hard to say today. While U of Phoenix is all over the US, continue to battle legal problems, let’s give the old alma mater a cheer! Who’s our team? Doesn’t matter; the game will be at the U of Phoenix stadium? Where’s that? Where the Arizona Cardinals play.

dunya macbean, at 8:15 am EDT on September 27, 2006

Dunya,

Actually, it offers a Wal-Mart education at Neiman Marcus prices.

-=Steve=-

Steve Foerster, Executive Director at Free Curricula Center, at 9:05 am EDT on September 27, 2006

Mythbuster, you reconcile it the same way my school reconciles paying the basketball coach more than the president. *They’re* happy with *their* choice; it’s *their* call.

Hoosier Prof, at 9:46 am EDT on September 27, 2006

UOP & Marketing, For-Profit Eduaction

As a graduate of two for-profit colleges and former attendee of at least eight non for profit colleges the comparison of a traditional College or University vs. a Proprietary based University seems a little like comparing a melon to a plate of fruit, both are good for you except one has more of the goodness you need. People who receive degrees from proprietary schools do so most times after their efforts to get one the traditional way has fail. The key word in the last sentence is tradition and tradition has gone to the wayside with online education (both my degrees are online based). It seems there is a social moral or group think from traditional schools that online is reserved only for the gifted or highly intellectual individual and people who want an education this way are suspect to possibly being lackadaisical in motivation or ability. Furthermore the idea of not being able to see touch and feel the student’s non-educational actions are very controversial to the traditional professor who is traditionally known as the ’sage on the stage’ where as in online they are the ‘guide on the side’. Education is a far encompassing ever developing world that should be perpetually open to newer and better ways of addressing the needs of learners and focused on competition academically to ensure results are the final product. For-Profits are more suited to change where as non for profits maintaining the status quo; familiarity breeds content and since more money is always available from some big universities alumni network’s endowment heck why not spend it towards better salaries or faculties. Education as always found controversy with synchronous vs. asynchronous delivery and it’s as old as traditional colleges and universities. Many people who maintain professional licenses such as Real Estate, Insurance and Securities do so via asynchronous learning and strictly deal with company based schools or for-profit based educational concepts that yield excellent results....shown in passing state based exams. Moreover these same people have many an industry based designation behind their name such as CFP, LUTCF and CRS that adds further legitimacies to their ability to be productive members of the American dream economically. Online has changed the world and those ‘real learners’ who are only trying earned a honest living relate to this; but then again more and more younger learners, handicapped learner and socially disadvantaged learner will continue to benefit from asynchronous delivery in spite of the big box theory of bigger is better and one must see, feel and touch your response in order to maintain that social superiority that coming from these non for profit institutions produce from it graduates so often;...not all however... mine you...but a lot. Change and earning a profit is not bad and if it helps someone develop a better self image about life....so what’s the problem with these big traditional universities then??maybe its money or showing a profit also.

Greg Harris, Alumni at AIU, at 3:35 pm EDT on September 27, 2006