What makes university of phoenix different

It has helped me with my career and my personal goals. I teach at a different University. And when comparing the two, I can attest to the academic rigors and standards set by UoP. Why are people still asking this question. Yes we are legit l. Yes the teachers are highly qualified and yes the work is rigourous. I received my Doctorate from UOP.

It has opened many doors for me. I also had a friend who started the Doctoral program at UOP, but finished her degree at a state university because it was easier. This article is written without a deep understanding of what the University of Phoenix is about. UOPX Is not an elitist institution, that is why there is open enrollment. The low graduation rate can be ascribed to that the students are all working adults who are studying part time.

Working, studying and taking care of family require time and commitment. I will strongly suggest that you do let your choice of school be influenced by this article as it is skewed in many respects.

The author of this article seems to have a strong bias against the University of Phoenix. My time at University of Phoenix was challenging, rewarding, and ultimately helped pave the way for my career change to IT. My education prepared me for the technical and business challenges ahead.

The global collaboration of UoP was also great practice for working in an interconnected world with colleagues from many different cultures. So yes, the University of Phoenix is legit, and not just for its accreditation. Yes, it was a lot of work tons. Yes, it was expensive still paying for it.

The general opinion among my cohort of students was that we would always pass, because they wanted to keep our dollars coming in. In fact, I know of no one that finished with less than a 3. I also thought it was very strange that they only used proprietary texts written by current, or former employees throughout my program. We used to jokingly refer to it as the University of Power Point, because most of our finals involved some form of class presentation rather than the usual written academic evaluation.

And despite being in a science based program, we were graded much heavier on presentation than content. About 2. The whole place was so incestuous.

Instructors teaching programming who had never programmed anything outside the classroom. But I also found out the sad truth, that no other institution would accept my credits in transfer. The degrees were priced so that students could cover the full cost using just government grants and loans. But Axia ended up causing a big problem -- one the University of Phoenix is still trying to recover from. Most of the students who started in the online associate's degree program ended up dropping out.

An investigation by the U. Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, chaired by Democrat Tom Harkin, found that in and more than , people enrolled in the online associate's degree program.

A year later, 66 percent of them had left. Senator Harkin says the business model of the University of Phoenix -- and the business model at other for-profits -- is to sign up as many students as possible. They pay their shareholders, they pay their school administrators.

And the student drops out and has this debt hanging over his or her head for the rest of their life," says Harkin. Harkin is particularly concerned about how much money the University of Phoenix gets from the government. In , 86 percent of revenue at the University of Phoenix came from the federal government in the form of student loans and Pell Grants. That's not unusual in the industry. Senator Harkin's Senate committee estimates that in , the nation's 15 publicly traded for-profit education companies received 86 percent of their revenue from taxpayers.

That total includes federal loans and Pell Grants, as well as government money that helps military members and veterans pay for school. This is a big change from the early days of the University of Phoenix, when students like Muriel Duncan had to pay with cash or a credit card because there was no way of getting federal aid.

Once the university was accredited, in , students could begin getting federal student loans and grants. Still, as recently as , the University of Phoenix got less than half its revenue from federal financial aid programs.

Most of the money came from students paying out of pocket and employers helping through tuition assistance programs. The University of Phoenix gets a higher proportion of its money from student aid programs because it serves more low-income students than it used to, and low-income students are eligible for both Pell Grants and the maximum student loan amount. In recent years the federal government has increased the amount of aid low-income students can get.

More than half of undergraduate students at the University of Phoenix used Pell Grants in Nationally, 27 percent of undergraduates received Pell Grants. This shift towards more low-income students has been happening at other for-profits too. Research by the Institute for Higher Education Policy finds that in the last decade, low-income students have been increasingly drawn to for-profit colleges.

They now attend for-profits at four times the rate of other students. Critics of for-profits are concerned that so many low-income and military students choose for-profit schools. Compared to community colleges and state universities, for-profits are expensive. The investigation by Senator Tom Harkin's Senate Committee found that bachelor's degree programs average about 19 percent more at for-profits than at flagship public universities; associate's degree programs cost four times as much at for-profits as they do at community colleges.

Senator Tom Harkin would like to see more students, especially low-income students, choose public colleges and universities. But that is becoming increasingly difficult for some students.

California is a prime example. Drastic state budget cuts in recent years have forced colleges and universities to turn away hundreds of thousands of students because there is not enough money to educate them.

Thousands more can't get the classes they need because of overcrowding. What's happening in California is a more dramatic version of what's happening all over the country: State support for higher education is going down, tuition is going up, and students are being turned away, or can't get the classes or the counseling they need to be successful. John Sperling looks at what is happening, especially in California, and sees the same problem he was trying to solve back in the s.

But critics are uncomfortable with the fact that John Sperling can make so much money when the traditional system fails. Sperling has no patience for that kind of criticism. Am I supposed to work hard to be a failure? Sperling is in many ways the epitome of the American Dream. He was born with nothing and through education and hard work became wildly successful. That path to success is more expensive today. College tuition has been rising faster than inflation for decades, and students at all schools are being asked to pay more of the cost.

The only way most of them can do it is to borrow lots of money. Critics of for-profit colleges say that, with tuition so high already, there's no room for big profits in higher education. But advocates for the University of Phoenix and other for-profit schools say they're good for the country because their business model allows them to expand and innovate rapidly. Even many experts who have mixed feelings about for-profits say America needs them in order to meet the growing demand for higher education.

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Download the book. Program Finder. At times they need to have degrees to get promoted. It cannot be denied that it is easier to go to an online school than a traditional school. It means that anyone who applies to it will get admitted. This is provided that they can meet the requirements. This is most likely to be one of the reasons why a lot of employers do not take applicants with online degrees seriously. Below are the names of some schools in the US that accepts all applicants that are able to meet their requirements:.

But because they are not online schools, they and the degrees they are offering are less likely to be frowned upon. One more reason exists why a lot of employers turn down applicants with online degrees. Also, sometimes referred to as degree mills, they are online companies or organizations. All of them claim to be colleges. What they are really offering, however, are illegitimate programs and diplomas. Needless to say, they are offering fake degrees.

In many instances, students do not even have to study. All they need to do is to give their credit card numbers in exchange for a degree. The problem with a degree from a diploma mill is that employers can easily tell it apart from a degree from an accredited school.

All they have to do is go online and perform a quick background check of the school offered the degree. Trying to get a degree from a diploma mill is a waste of time. Other than this, what sets diploma mills apart from other online schools is that they are not accredited, unlike the University of Phoenix and other similar schools.

This is why before you go to any school, be it online or traditional, make sure that it is accredited in order for you to avoid wasting your time and money trying to get a college degree. Complete Guide. First things first: UoP is a for-profit school. A lot of people are not fond of for-profit schools thinking that they offer nothing but expensive, poor-quality education.

After all, they are first and foremost businesses whose primary purpose is to maximize profits for their owners as well as stockholders. However, just like traditional schools, not all for-profit schools are bad. However, there are also benefits to going to them. They include an easy admission process, flexible schedule, and skill-based training. UoP first came into being back in The main goal of its founder, John Sperling , was to make higher education more accessible to adults who wished to work and study all at once.

The very first class took place in , with only eight students. It got accredited the following year, and, a couple of years later, it opened a campus in San Jose, California. Yes, UoP started out as a brick-and-mortar school.