Patten MBA in 4 months???

[Yanji]

While most for profits are terrible and do have stigma attached to them, I disagree that Patten would fall into that stigma category. Patten is unknown and that is a good thing since they are for-profits. One of the reasons for-profits get slammed is their high cost and Patten is the opposite of that, offering one of the most affordable degrees in higher ed.

The problem is that it's nigh impossible for someone without previous knowledge to distinguish the nuances between proprietaries. When someone gets arrested on the street, people passing by automatically assume that person has committed a crime, even if they do not know the circumstances and the person is not a criminal until convicted in court. Being a proprietary simply makes you guilty by association. Additionally, high tuition is only one of the ways in which for-profit colleges exploit students.

From an employment perspective, first impressions are everything, and while graduating from a for-profit school is not necessarily a deal-breaker, it certainly raises eyebrows for the wrong reasons. Granted, going to a relatively unknown school will ameliorate this somewhat, but obscurity will not help when applying to a subsequent degree program. If there's one place that actually checks these kinds of things and cares, it's academia, which holds a far dimmer view of proprietaries than private industry or the government does.