Patten University is Closing

[Toastmaster]

There's some useful / interesting information about the sale here:

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-07-09-...h-platform

Very good read. Thank you. This part bothered me though:
"Thomas Stewart, the former president of Patten University and now president of John F. Kennedy Online"

How can the person that drove the old school into the ground, run the "new" school?

[MNomadic]

There's some useful / interesting information about the sale here:

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-07-09-...h-platform

Very good read. Thank you. This part bothered me though:
"Thomas Stewart, the former president of Patten University and now president of John F. Kennedy Online"

How can the person that drove the old school into the ground, run the "new" school?

Lol good question!

[sanantone]

There's some useful / interesting information about the sale here:

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-07-09-...h-platform

This would be a good case study for an education administration program. The article alleges that Patten's tuition wasn't high enough to operate the school and that they should have started accepting financial aid. The only other online RA school I can think of that does this payment plan thing is California Southern University. They're more expensive than Patten and charge by the credit hour.

Patten should have looked at WGU as a model. WGU is more expensive and harder to afford payments for, but accepting loans allows students to delay payments until they graduate and, hopefully, have better-paying jobs. Also, WGU ends up being cheaper for most of those who qualify for the Pell Grant. Patten didn't even accept TA or the GI Bill.

I don't know how it worked at Patten; I guess students graduated without debt. At the other schools that have monthly payments, it's a lie that students graduate debt-free. They usually graduate in debt to the school, and some schools won't issue transcripts and a diploma until you pay off that debt.

[dfrecore]

There's some useful / interesting information about the sale here:

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-07-09-...h-platform

This would be a good case study for an education administration program. The article alleges that Patten's tuition wasn't high enough to operate the school and that they should have started accepting financial aid. The only other online RA school I can think of that does this payment plan thing is California Southern University. They're more expensive than Patten and charge by the credit hour.

Patten should have looked at WGU as a model. WGU is more expensive and harder to afford payments for, but accepting loans allows students to delay payments until they graduate and, hopefully, have better-paying jobs. Also, WGU ends up being cheaper for most of those who qualify for the Pell Grant. Patten didn't even accept TA or the GI Bill.

I don't know how it worked at Patten; I guess students graduated without debt. At the other schools that have monthly payments, it's a lie that students graduate debt-free. They usually graduate in debt to the school, and some schools won't issue transcripts and a diploma until you pay off that debt.

I agree that Patten just didn't have their act together.  They should have charged a rate that kept the school afloat, and they should have accepted TA, GI bill, and Pell grants.  It doesn't make sense not to accept those.

They also should have put more time and money into the program, to make sure that people were coming in with as many credits as possible, so that they could graduate in a timely manner.  There would have been more positive things said about them, and more people going to check them out because of that.  Instead, they always just seems a step behind, and people did the "wait-and-see" method of waiting until more people came out with degrees - which never materialized.

I think it's great that they wanted students to graduate debt-free, but as their model shows, limiting options doesn't work well.  I think people were probably putting tuition on their credit cards if they couldn't afford to make the payments, so while they were debt-free as far as the school was concerned, that may not have been the case.

As for Cal Southern U, they have some strange "payment plans."  #1 is paying for a year up front.  Hardly a great plan.  #2 is paying for a semester at a time up front - pretty much the same as every other school out there.  #3 is paying $295 a month, which doesn't even pay for a semester hour for the cheapest degree, leading me to believe that people are going into debt to that school.  If you transferred in 90cr, leaving 30cr to take there, that would be $11250.  At $295/mo, that would take 38 months to pay off.  So you'd still be paying and waiting for your degree and transcripts more than 2 years after graduation.  Again, this is a terrible plan.  If you want to go with a school that has rolling monthly starts and is cheaper, you'd be much better off at APU/AMU.  I'm sure there are other choices as well, including the Big 3, WGU, and more.  Your local 4-yr school would probably be cheaper (I know ours is).

BTW - our local CC just started payment plans, but you have to pay the full amount by the end of the semester.  So you can be debt free by the time you finish.  This is a true debt-free degree with a payment plan.

[sanantone]

There's some useful / interesting information about the sale here:

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-07-09-...h-platform

This would be a good case study for an education administration program. The article alleges that Patten's tuition wasn't high enough to operate the school and that they should have started accepting financial aid. The only other online RA school I can think of that does this payment plan thing is California Southern University. They're more expensive than Patten and charge by the credit hour.

Patten should have looked at WGU as a model. WGU is more expensive and harder to afford payments for, but accepting loans allows students to delay payments until they graduate and, hopefully, have better-paying jobs. Also, WGU ends up being cheaper for most of those who qualify for the Pell Grant. Patten didn't even accept TA or the GI Bill.

I don't know how it worked at Patten; I guess students graduated without debt. At the other schools that have monthly payments, it's a lie that students graduate debt-free. They usually graduate in debt to the school, and some schools won't issue transcripts and a diploma until you pay off that debt.

I agree that Patten just didn't have their act together.  They should have charged a rate that kept the school afloat, and they should have accepted TA, GI bill, and Pell grants.  It doesn't make sense not to accept those.

They also should have put more time and money into the program, to make sure that people were coming in with as many credits as possible, so that they could graduate in a timely manner.  There would have been more positive things said about them, and more people going to check them out because of that.  Instead, they always just seems a step behind, and people did the "wait-and-see" method of waiting until more people came out with degrees - which never materialized.

I think it's great that they wanted students to graduate debt-free, but as their model shows, limiting options doesn't work well.  I think people were probably putting tuition on their credit cards if they couldn't afford to make the payments, so while they were debt-free as far as the school was concerned, that may not have been the case.

As for Cal Southern U, they have some strange "payment plans."  #1 is paying for a year up front.  Hardly a great plan.  #2 is paying for a semester at a time up front - pretty much the same as every other school out there.  #3 is paying $295 a month, which doesn't even pay for a semester hour for the cheapest degree, leading me to believe that people are going into debt to that school.  If you transferred in 90cr, leaving 30cr to take there, that would be $11250.  At $295/mo, that would take 38 months to pay off.  So you'd still be paying and waiting for your degree and transcripts more than 2 years after graduation.  Again, this is a terrible plan.  If you want to go with a school that has rolling monthly starts and is cheaper, you'd be much better off at APU/AMU.  I'm sure there are other choices as well, including the Big 3, WGU, and more.  Your local 4-yr school would probably be cheaper (I know ours is).

BTW - our local CC just started payment plans, but you have to pay the full amount by the end of the semester.  So you can be debt free by the time you finish.  This is a true debt-free degree with a payment plan.

CalSouthern is more expensive than APUS, so I don't see the deal. Since they don't have the administrative costs of managing Title IV, they should be able to charge less. But, did you see that their RN to BSN program is only $150 per credit? That's amazing!

[cookderosa]

I'm a fan of WGU and knew about them first, so in my mind I think I've always compared against the WGU program. I think competency-based programs are most like a MOOC and appeal only to the most highly motivated individual - I'd be interested to see if their completion rates were lower than an acceptable level.

[dfrecore]

CalSouthern ... RN to BSN program is only $150 per credit? That's amazing!

Yes, I did see that - if anyone asks on here, I would definitely tell them to check it out.  $150/cr is a fantastic price.

[eLearner]

What a shame. Looks like the NUS has acquired them. We'll see what that means, but JFK's comparable system costs $8500 a year, so a fast mover would still never be able to save what they could have at Patten. Would be nice if they chopped the price up into 3 terms of 4 months each and divided the cost among them so if you finish faster you pay less... and they say for-profits are the money-munchers.

[sanantone]

What a shame. Looks like the NUS has acquired them. We'll see what that means, but JFK's comparable system costs $8500 a year, so a fast mover would still never be able to save what they could have at Patten. Would be nice if they chopped the price up into 3 terms of 4 months each and divided the cost among them so if you finish faster you pay less... and they say for-profits are the money-munchers.

But, JFK's self-paced programs are cheaper than the average for-profit college. They're even cheaper than the average public university. If you don't like JFK's price, you can always go to the cheaper, non-profit WGU. NAU, a public university, also has cheaper, competency-based programs.

Patten was for-profit and cheaper, but they're gone. What good does being extra cheap do when a school can't even remain open? Did you email or call JFK University, or are you just assuming that the tuition has to be paid all at once?

[eLearner]

But my point is that JFK is not cheaper than Patten, so anyone who was planning on Patten and specifically the price/tuition setup will have to make new plans and JFK probably wouldn't fit into them. As for the yearly tuition, I guess it wouldn't matter if they made you pay all at once or on a payment plan, because at the end of the day you're still going to pay $8500 for the year.

NAU appears to offer very little in the way of self-paced graduate programs compared to what Patten offered. I only see one in Nursing.

I don't think Patten's prices were a reason for their selling off. Lack of any real marketing after 2013, coupled with a bunch of been-there-done-that programs likely had a lot more to do with it.