What's the weirdest thing you've heard someone say about college?

[sanantone]

I have never been a fan of Univ. of Pheonix, but I have had one bright young Captain work for me in a combat zone who was better than 99% of B&M graduates.  He had a "hick" High school diploma, West Point BS, and Univ. of Pheonix masters degree.  I don't judge UP as fast as most.  It's still not for me.  Others will judge the Big 3 as subpar, but not me.

Uh, he went to West Point! The UoP degree is just there because taxpayers paid for it.

I think West Point prepared him well.  Like it or not UofP was part of his background and he was better than most.  He would go on and command bigger and better units and retired.

Well, West Point is highly-selective, so it wouldn't be surprising if he were brilliant. I doubt he was better than most because he got a check-the-box master's with TA.

---

Since you mentioned retirement as a captain, I'm going to assume this is an older guy who probably earned his master's degree when online programs were rare.

The same thing happens with B&M universities.  I know of one Masters in Outdoor Leadership where the only real requirement is a 25-page thesis.  Talk about a check-the-box.

Most master's programs in the U.S. have no thesis requirement. The U.S. has a course-based structure for its graduate programs. And, UoP was/is a B&M university. They've had to close campuses in recent years, but UoP was around before it had online programs. At the height of their popularity, most of their students were not online.

[dfrecore]

I believe that anyone can get a good education if they are motivated enough.   But I have known people to take UoP classes and I've heard the same feedback.  Basically, you can go and kick ass and take names if you want, or you can skate through it and as long as you pay your tuition on time and make a marginal attempt to turn in assignments, you'll pass.  It may not be with a 4.0, but you'll get your piece of paper.

Of course the same thing can be said for any for-profit education.   My first job was in for-profit education - in another country but it was exactly the same.   In a nutshell, you have revenue goals to meet and if people don't make it, you have to get rid of the absolute worst or you risk losing the decent students.   But other than that, you just pass people through if they can go through the motions.   If someone pays well, you do what it takes to keep them.  

So, not to say that UoP doesn't have good lessons, just like the school I worked for in Mexico had amazing English classes.  (They really did!)  It just means that like any for-profit company, the priority will always be the numbers.

Ummm...hate to point this out, but this is the case for ALL schools, not just for-profits.  Maybe you haven't noticed, but kids these days aren't coming out of college as geniuses with all kinds of knowledge.  Watch any of those "about town" bits on late night TV, especially the ones on college campuses, and you'll be shocked at the stupidity of college students; and it's not getting better, it's getting worse!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-wou...1554936810

You need a subscription to read. I have free access through UF, but I don't feel like searching for my username and password. I wonder if this is an empirical study or another one of those dumb higher education articles that journalists love to write.

It's by an Ohio University professor who's been teaching there for 55 years, but it's been proven multiple times over the years:

One reason college is so costly and so little real learning occurs is that collegiate resources are vastly underused. Students don’t study much, professors teach little, few people read most of the obscure papers the professors write, and even the buildings are empty most of the time.

The New York Federal Reserve says more than 40% of recent college graduates are “underemployed,” but many already are while in school. Surveys of student work habits find that the average amount of time spent in class and otherwise studying is about 27 hours a week. The typical student takes classes only 32 weeks a year, so he spends fewer than 900 hours annually on academics—less time than a typical eighth-grader, and perhaps half the time their parents work to help finance college.

It wasn’t always this way. As economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks have demonstrated, students in the middle of the 20th century spent nearly 50% more time—around 40 hours weekly—studying. They now lack incentives to work very hard, since the average grade today—a B or B-plus—is much higher than in 1960 when the average grade-point average of around 2.5 implied a typical grade of B-minus or C-plus.

I’m part of the problem: I’ve been teaching for 55 years, and I assign far less reading, demand less writing, and give higher grades than I did two generations ago.

Learning takes time, so the diminution of effort surely means students are learning less. Snippets of data confirm that suspicion. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have demonstrated, using the Collegiate Learning Assessment, that the typical college senior has only marginally better critical reasoning and writing skills than a freshman. Federal Adult Literacy Survey data, admittedly somewhat outdated, shows declining literacy among college grads in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. A civic literacy test administered by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows appalling gaps in knowledge, with seniors knowing very little more than freshmen. Only 24% of graduates know that the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of an official church.

As for the faculty, the Education Department doesn’t publish annual data on teaching loads, but some hard data plus considerable anecdotal evidence suggests the typical professor is in class around one-third fewer hours than his 1965 counterpart. At my mid-quality state university (Ohio University), I taught three courses a week for nine hours in 1965; my colleagues today teach only two courses for six hours. At some top-flight research universities, senior professors may teach only one course.

The excuse is that professors today are publishing more research. True, but why? Mark Bauerlein at Emory has documented that in English (literary criticism), the volume of research is immense—but little of it is often cited or even read. Why should professors reduce their teaching loads to write papers for the Journal of Last Resort? Diminishing returns have long since set in.

The litany of underused resources goes on. In 1970 at a typical university there were perhaps two professors for each administrator. Today, there are usually more nonteaching administrators than professors. Even the buildings don’t work very hard. Most classrooms and faculty offices are deserted in June, July and August, and often for much of May and December. Even in peak academic months, classrooms are typically seldom used in late afternoons and often not on Fridays.

To be sure, there are many exceptions. On some campuses, students study much more. Engineering majors probably work much harder than communications or gender-studies majors. And there are professors who are in their offices more than a few hours a week. Students in law and medical schools often work very long hours. Many hard-science researchers spend much time in their labs.

Still, Time Use Survey data from the Labor Department suggest that students spend more time on recreation and partying than on academics, and most professors are not often found during daytime hours in the office, classroom, laboratory or the library. Where are they? What are they doing? Why can’t students and faculty show the same work ethic that made our market-disciplined nation the wealthiest place in history?

I'm shocked (shouldn't be) that university professors teach 6-9 hours a WEEK and that's what we're paying them for???  Yeah, some spend more time on campus, but you can't tell me these people are working 40 hours a week like the rest of society!

[sanantone]

I believe that anyone can get a good education if they are motivated enough.   But I have known people to take UoP classes and I've heard the same feedback.  Basically, you can go and kick ass and take names if you want, or you can skate through it and as long as you pay your tuition on time and make a marginal attempt to turn in assignments, you'll pass.  It may not be with a 4.0, but you'll get your piece of paper.

Of course the same thing can be said for any for-profit education.   My first job was in for-profit education - in another country but it was exactly the same.   In a nutshell, you have revenue goals to meet and if people don't make it, you have to get rid of the absolute worst or you risk losing the decent students.   But other than that, you just pass people through if they can go through the motions.   If someone pays well, you do what it takes to keep them.  

So, not to say that UoP doesn't have good lessons, just like the school I worked for in Mexico had amazing English classes.  (They really did!)  It just means that like any for-profit company, the priority will always be the numbers.

Ummm...hate to point this out, but this is the case for ALL schools, not just for-profits.  Maybe you haven't noticed, but kids these days aren't coming out of college as geniuses with all kinds of knowledge.  Watch any of those "about town" bits on late night TV, especially the ones on college campuses, and you'll be shocked at the stupidity of college students; and it's not getting better, it's getting worse!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-wou...1554936810

You need a subscription to read. I have free access through UF, but I don't feel like searching for my username and password. I wonder if this is an empirical study or another one of those dumb higher education articles that journalists love to write.

I'm shocked (shouldn't be) that university professors teach 6-9 hours a WEEK and that's what we're paying them for???  Yeah, some spend more time on campus, but you can't tell me these people are working 40 hours a week like the rest of society!

As the article states, there is a lot of pressure to publish. Professors spend most of their time conducting research. I have three reasons why I changed my mind about becoming a professor. Because of growing competition from for-profit and non-traditional non-profits, colleges have become more customer service-oriented. Colleges are letting students dictate what they should learn and how they should learn it, but they're not the experts. Secondly, criminal justice students are dumb. Thirdly, professors publish a lot of junk papers just so that they can get tenure. It's not that they don't want to do good work; there are just so many studies you can do in one area. 

I would like to see the study itself to see if they broke down study time by college type. Starting in the late 90s, more people were able to go to college because of the advent of online programs. There were more people attending open admissions universities.

[burbuja0512]

I believe that anyone can get a good education if they are motivated enough.   But I have known people to take UoP classes and I've heard the same feedback.  Basically, you can go and kick ass and take names if you want, or you can skate through it and as long as you pay your tuition on time and make a marginal attempt to turn in assignments, you'll pass.  It may not be with a 4.0, but you'll get your piece of paper.

Of course the same thing can be said for any for-profit education.   My first job was in for-profit education - in another country but it was exactly the same.   In a nutshell, you have revenue goals to meet and if people don't make it, you have to get rid of the absolute worst or you risk losing the decent students.   But other than that, you just pass people through if they can go through the motions.   If someone pays well, you do what it takes to keep them.  

So, not to say that UoP doesn't have good lessons, just like the school I worked for in Mexico had amazing English classes.  (They really did!)  It just means that like any for-profit company, the priority will always be the numbers.

Ummm...hate to point this out, but this is the case for ALL schools, not just for-profits.  Maybe you haven't noticed, but kids these days aren't coming out of college as geniuses with all kinds of knowledge.  Watch any of those "about town" bits on late night TV, especially the ones on college campuses, and you'll be shocked at the stupidity of college students; and it's not getting better, it's getting worse!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-wou...1554936810

I don't know that I totally agree.  I think that there are always kids that are pushed through for whatever reason, but the motivations in a for-profit situation just are different.

When I worked in for-profit education, we had sales goals to meet that included both reinrollment and new enrollment.  So, as the director of a school, I HAD to keep a certain number of repeat customers... I mean students..  coming back month after month or I literally got half a paycheck.     

So I don't know the motivation behind non-profit as I haven't worked in non-profit education, but my personal experiences with sales targets and viewing students as numbers to continually increase did taint my view.    I have worked in the non-profit sector inot directly in education and can attest to the fact that there are similiar pressures when it comes to revenue generation, but they are a lot lower.   You don't feel like your job is riding on the next sale, unlike the for-profit world.

It's just not a healthy enviroment and by default will lead to some cutting corners.  So not to say that non-profit is perfect.  Just to say that for-profit in education definitely fosters an environment which could more easily encourage shady behavior.

[sanantone]

I believe that anyone can get a good education if they are motivated enough.   But I have known people to take UoP classes and I've heard the same feedback.  Basically, you can go and kick ass and take names if you want, or you can skate through it and as long as you pay your tuition on time and make a marginal attempt to turn in assignments, you'll pass.  It may not be with a 4.0, but you'll get your piece of paper.

Of course the same thing can be said for any for-profit education.   My first job was in for-profit education - in another country but it was exactly the same.   In a nutshell, you have revenue goals to meet and if people don't make it, you have to get rid of the absolute worst or you risk losing the decent students.   But other than that, you just pass people through if they can go through the motions.   If someone pays well, you do what it takes to keep them.  

So, not to say that UoP doesn't have good lessons, just like the school I worked for in Mexico had amazing English classes.  (They really did!)  It just means that like any for-profit company, the priority will always be the numbers.

Ummm...hate to point this out, but this is the case for ALL schools, not just for-profits.  Maybe you haven't noticed, but kids these days aren't coming out of college as geniuses with all kinds of knowledge.  Watch any of those "about town" bits on late night TV, especially the ones on college campuses, and you'll be shocked at the stupidity of college students; and it's not getting better, it's getting worse!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-wou...1554936810

I don't know that I totally agree.  I think that there are always kids that are pushed through for whatever reason, but the motivations in a for-profit situation just are different.

When I worked in for-profit education, we had sales goals to meet that included both reinrollment and new enrollment.  So, as the director of a school, I HAD to keep a certain number of repeat customers... I mean students..  coming back month after month or I literally got half a paycheck.     

So I don't know the motivation behind non-profit as I haven't worked in non-profit education, but my personal experiences with sales targets and viewing students as numbers to continually increase did taint my view.    I have worked in the non-profit sector inot directly in education and can attest to the fact that there are similiar pressures when it comes to revenue generation, but they are a lot lower.   You don't feel like your job is riding on the next sale, unlike the for-profit world.

It's just not a healthy enviroment and by default will lead to some cutting corners.  So not to say that non-profit is perfect.  Just to say that for-profit in education definitely fosters an environment which could more easily encourage shady behavior.

There are generally differences between how non-profit and for-profit organizations operate because their goals and stakeholders are different. I taught at a for-profit school and public university. The Director of Education at the for-profit kept reminding us that our "clientele" weren't like the students at the local non-profit universitie. Our students needed to be "entertained."

I also worked for a non-profit organization that operated a therapeutic community within a prison run by a for-profit company that eventually won the therapeutic community contract too. When the for-profit organization took over, most of the counselors jumped ship because priorities changed. I also compare what I saw in that prison to my experience working as a corrections officer at a sheriff's department. A lot of the officers the for-profit organization hired wouldn't have been able to pass pre-employment testing and a background check at a sheriff's department.