Computer StuffYou've likely seen those commercials or been solicited directly by telephone as an excellent candidate for AIU online, phoenix online, or devry university. Their 'counselors' entice you with the speed and flexibility of their program as well as the marketability of the degrees.
The "college presidents" dont look at charts and data that says how well you're doing and the teacher preformances. They look at charts like these:
They're bean counters. They adjust things based on how much money they can get fiscally each year. It benefits them highly to look for students that are just out of the army and their wives because they have a high level of financial aid they can quickly grab without the person really making a fuss when they drop out, or get dropped for pointless reasons. For example would a legitimate college have an opt-out list like AIU.
AIU is a project owned by the Career Education Corporation which owns several other online universities. If you'll look at their main page they do not boast the accolades of their alumni or display success rates. No. They show you their nasdaq stock symbol, and their 3 billion dollar a year industry gains, along with their growth stragegy, which for the consumer, means more aggressive marketing methods in order to gain more money and gain more investors in an ever increasing cycle of aggressiveness.
Financial programs meaning take more money from government grants to fund the students that apply. They use the same classes and video every year and patent it as 4dimentional learning technology. Their scripts, videos, animations and lessons can easily be stolen by a technically adept person, but no such person would have the ignorance to not see it has scam written all over it. If any student can steal the content so easily, since it's all on the web, no matter how secure they say it is, it can be copied and thrown onto peer to peer networks and invalidate your years of payment with people using the same information free. Why would ANYONE use online universities when they can study online free in MIT opencourseware. If they get excellent grades the first year in a community college and demonstrate their skills to an advisor theirs no reason they cant get a scholarship and do legitamite ITV, and online courses from a *REAL* university, not a scam one that payed people off to be acredited. Ripoff report always has a list of online universities as their front page scam leaders. The corporations should realize, at some point, aggressive marketing turns into misleading scamming.
These programs are now multinational in the more recent wave of globalization. Teens often find these programs in popular socialization networks and even the very popular scholarship search, "fastweb". They dont know how these groups operate but they like the idea of it not taking long. The "counselors" call and try to make their sale. It's like telemarketing with a realestate twist on comission. One ad I remember popping up for awhile was a "ARE YOU HOT" quiz that appeared in contextual google ads on my page. I finally took the time to take it, curious about how they were making money off that rubbish and found at the end of the quiz if you want your results you have to enter a bunch of contact details for the online universities like the main players, phoenix online, devry and AIU.
They spend more money on advertising than they ever will on anyone's education. They have a massive team of telemarketers that will take an hour trying to convince you on the sale. They talk to you about how you're a great candidate for the school and you have all the right character and abilities. Since many youths dream about being discovered and taking a great leap in their lives, they feel it's the opportunity to do so, and get their parents, and the governments financial support support. Even if you dont care, you're still paying more taxes because of these monsters, because the poor students would have been much less likely to apply for these programs on their own. The "counselors" do it for them. Anyone whose not seen a very targetted devry university ad on tv while staing home on a work day, let me know.
Most the schools charge you 30,000+ depending on the plan you choose and even have the nerve to drop you if you do not follow their terms exactly. They'll take the full amount without refund for their grotesquely overcharging semester. People are less likely to complain after being social engineered for weeks for talking to counselors and getting a lot of fluff.
On the overture recommend tool see how much people are really paying just for you to see their online university ad. Type phoenix online, aiu online, devry. It's incredible they pay 30-60 per CLICK, mouse click, that you just look at their ad, because they know, mathematically, even if 1/1000 join, they're still making a killer profit. You'll notice their pages are not like normal university pages, but they're doorway pages, with no further links. It's a form and there's no where else to click but to fill it out, usually with the back button being disabled. This is marketing. Not education.
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