Patten University is Closing

[sanantone]

It could also be that WGU is incredibly friendly!  The marketing is excellent as well.  Online, it's honestly the only school I see competing for dollars against the likes of Capella and others.

Edit:. Oh!  And Excelsior.  I do see Excelsior from time to time.  I would like to see more of TESU.

WGU has been very smart. They keep their tuition low, they market everywhere, and they've made partnerships with several states to the point that they have this semi-public status. 

Patten University used to send out spam, which is a horrible marketing practice. After that, I didn't come across any advertisements for them. If you received the spam, you probably thought the school was a scam. Otherwise, no one else knew about them.

Capella has been adding a ton of FlexPath programs, so I'm assuming they're doing well. I don't know how University of Wisconsin and Brandman are doing. NAU has been adding programs very slowly. I think Walden only has three CBE programs.

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One of the things that I didn't find helpful was when I called to find out about the gen ed portion of the degree, they seemed really inflexible.  Instead of having categories of courses that what you've already taken can fulfill, they have very specific courses.  This did not work well with what a returning-to-school adult would want.

They also didn't seem to be customer-focused, and I don't think many on this forum completed a degree there, because things ended up not working out the way they had thought they would.

This is a bummer, but I'm not surprised.  I think eventually, there will only be WGU left in this space.

Not even traditional schools are this restrictive with transfer credits. I think the problem was that Patten was only able to offer a limited number of gen ed courses, and they made the mistake of requiring transfer courses to be exact matches. Most schools have general categories, such as social science, and a long list of courses can be used to fulfill that requirement. The Big 3 have limited course options, but just because they don't offer a course, it does not mean that it can't be transferred in.