Patten University is Closing

[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.