Petition: Excelsior Needs to Drop Its Partnership with Pearson

[sanantone]

Excelsior needs to drop its partnership with Pearson so that students can avoid the high testing fee and be able to take the test through ProctorU. Excelsior could also benefit from adopting TESC's model of counting their in-house CBE toward their residency requirement. Under Excelsior's Excelsior Course Option, one can avoid the enrollment fee, but this requires taking $5,580 worth of credits. It's cheaper to just pay the enrollment fee.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/314/606/4...residency/

[Saharapost]

Agreed, signed.

[Exfactor]

With 37,000 students they won't care. Excelsior right now seems more interested in adding more online course options, and improving their online infrastructure. This fall they are basically filling in the gap by offering more courses for degree requirements, where before you had to test out or take such at another school to fill the requirements. Just by looking at the number of students that want to take online courses, and are wait listed, it seems Excelsior is recognizing where their bread and butter is. Hopefully soon they will focus more on there testing options.

[UptonSinclair]

With the attitudes I saw at Excelsior before I left, the Big 3 will soon be the Big 2. I wouldn't be surprised to see the acceptance of alternative credits dwindle greatly as they work on improving their fleecing methods.

[Exfactor]

With the attitudes I saw at Excelsior before I left, the Big 3 will soon be the Big 2. I wouldn't be surprised to see the acceptance of alternative credits dwindle greatly as they work on improving their fleecing methods.

I think we have to recognize that these schools are in the business of making a profit just like any other businesses. They are always thinking of ways to increase their profit while maintaining academic integrity (this can be seen with tesc no longer allowing fema credits). When we look at many state schools, their entire purpose of adding online classes and degrees is to increase revenue to keep their B&M afloat, they generally care nothing about distance learning. When the big three added the capstone course they found another way to increase revenue. Personally, I don't see the Big 3 changing at all, especially if testing options still exist at Excelsior.

[sanantone]

Since the Big 3 are all not-for-profit, their goal is to have a balanced budget. TESC and COSC don't have to worry as much about revenue since they are government-subsidized. Even though Excelsior has over 30k students, if most are transferring in large numbers of credits, then they have to do something to encourage them to take their courses. That is why Excelsior has done so much to try to get students to take their courses or tests e.g. their strict English Comp requirements. I haven't seen this confirmed, but I heard that they no longer accept Penn Foster for the information literacy requirement.

I think the capstone requirements were more for accreditation and quality reasons.