You'Ve seen the ads you've seen the scandals you've dreamed of graduating from the University of Phoenix, but is this for-profit from the deserts of Arizona the right school? For you, the University of Phoenix was founded in 1976 and grew to a mind-blowing enrollment of 476 000 students by 2010.
But in the past two decades, they've been dogged by scandals by lawsuits and a lot of people saying that what is going on there is not legit and interestingly now they only have 84 000 students. So what gives is the University of Phoenix right for you and to answer that question? We'Re going to give them letter grades in four categories: transfer, friendliness, cost degree, choice and student experience, we're gon na average it out into a GPA and a good hackable school should get at least a 3.
By the way, if you want help picking out a college that is the right fit for you or help putting together a degree plan that will get you graduated in 18 months for under ten thousand dollars me and my team would love to help.
You just sign up for a consult with us at the Link in the description honestly, Phoenix is only somewhat transfer friendly now, like most schools, they only require that you complete 25 of the degree with them.
Second, they accept all five of the big alternative credits like CLEP Sophia, straighterline, study.com, dsst,
If you don't know what those are check out, this article up here they're basically super quick and inexpensive ways of earning college credit, but the problem is: is that while they accept a lot of them, they don't really accept them as the kinds of credits you need For example, if you were trying to transfer credits into a business degree at University of Phoenix all of these business courses, some of which would normally be maybe an upper level course or specifically a business course of any kind - are only listed as interdisciplinary electives.
And that's basically University of Phoenix's way of saying, like yeah, we'll accept these business courses, but we're not going to let them apply to your major you're, only going to be able to transfer stuff into your general education or your free electives.
Now you might be able to transfer in credits from another school, but it's going to be very difficult to earn some of the credits you need non-traditionally, and that leads us into our third item, which is that they don't really have free elective sections.
While I was researching their degrees, I got a kind of a funny feeling with some of the things I was Finding, because I didn't really reference their free electives a lot, and so I messaged their chat feature talk to an advisor and she confirmed that.
Yes, basically, what happens is when you're, taking your your major and you finish, your general education and it's time to do your free electives at University of Phoenix
They want you to pick from a very specific list of courses that can then fit into your free electives, which makes it harder for you to hack those credits and harder for you to transfer those credits in the fourth thing is actually a really good thing, and It'S that because they're so big they've dealt with a lot of community colleges sending students their way, so they actually have equivalency lists for where some of your community college credits might go depending on what school that you're from and finally University of Phoenix does provide a Few other ways that you can get college credit pretty quickly from them, such as through work, life experience and Military credit opportunities.
So, overall, I'm not really sure what to make of University of Phoenix's transfer friendliness. I'M a little bit shocked by how unfriendly they are towards alternative credit and how strict their degree plans are.
So because of all that, but because there's still some good stuff in there, too we're going to go ahead and give them a c.
The University of Phoenix charges slightly below the average per credit at 398 dollars.
But if you look at their web page long enough and search hard enough, you'll notice that they're very vocal about how they only have one fee per course. But you'll have to look a lot harder to try to figure out just how much that fee is.
I spent 15 minutes looking for it and could not find it on their website, so I checked with an advisor and they confirmed that it is 170 dollars per class, taking the expense from forty eight thousand dollars in tuition to fifty five thousand dollars total, which is Above average expensive, I'm gon na still give their cost to see because it's only slightly above average, but we're gon na come back to Hidden fees later.
What, when we assess degree options at a school, we're looking for two things? Variety and flexibility for variety University of Phoenix has 35 Majors to choose from that's surprisingly small for such a big school, but they do cover all the bases.
We'Ve got business and accounting We'Ve got marketing, computer science, criminal, justice, Education, Health Management, so many good ones to choose from their selection is decent, but still not quite as good as some of the other big online schools out there and as for flexibility, Phoenix isn't so Great Remember how earlier I mentioned that they don't really seem to have free electives check out this business degree over here when I was researching for this article a couple of weeks ago, I could have sworn that they mentioned 14 core classes, 12 general education courses and Then Some electives that you could choose from different things with, I think they even had it listed over here.
They had it in a ton of different places, but now you can't find it anywhere.
They have 40 courses per degree, but they only list 26 of them right here.
So what exactly are they trying to hide, and I think that if they are trying to hide something - and I would love to be wrong about this - what they're trying to hide is that they don't really have free electives, that you can just transfer in and fill Up, however, you want best case scenario: they've changed their policy.
I somehow didn't understand their policy. Their advisor was mistaken when she spoke to me or worst case scenario, they're trying to get people to transfer in and then when you get in and they've got your information and they're talking to you, they say well looks like you're still gon na have to take All those free electives, because none of your transfer credits matched up to the free electives we require you to take.
I would love to be wrong about that and if somebody can confirm with a link or or something somewhere in a comment down below that, I am wrong.
I will pin that and we can all feel a lot better about this in the end, while their flexibility is awful, they still have a decent size, general education area and and they do have slightly above average degree choice. They actually have a lot of really good degrees to choose from so we're going to average it out and give them a c for degree choice and now we're going to talk about student experience number one.
They accept 100 of students, no problem getting in number two. They only graduate 27 of those students, which is the best graduation rate I've seen from a for-profit in a while, but it's still six percent lower than the big box non-profit online colleges and those rates aren't even that good, all of which just kind of speaks to Either a predatory advertising practices or a subpar educational experience, which leads us to number three and that's that.
Yes, the University of Phoenix is for profit, which in general, doesn't condemn a school, but is a major red flag, and University of Phoenix in particular, has been host to a ton of scandals.
Let'S take a look at their Wikipedia page 2007. The New York Times reported the school's educational quality had eroded in 2 thousand.
The federal government find the University's 6 million for including study group meetings as instructional hours 2003 lawsuit because they violated The Higher Education Act due to Illegal practices regarding recruiting in 2010, University of Phoenix Commander government scrutiny after its campuses were found to have engaged in deceptive Enrollment practices and fraudulent solicitation of FAFSA funds, former senior vice president Tucker noted that at critical junctures, the co-founder John Sperling chose growth over academic Integrity.
The other co-owner wrote about the school's degeneration from a provider of working adult continuing education programs to a money-making machine whose sole Criterion for admission was eligibility for federally funded student loans. Here we have a bunch of money they had to pay because of misleading advertisements. Yeah
So some pretty shady stuff guys and then there's all the stuff about only charging one fee, but you can't find out how much it costs unless you know where to look and it costs a hundred and seventy dollars per course and on their tuition comparison page.
They have the audacity to compare themselves to snhu and to claim that snhu charges multiple fees when in fact, snhu only requires that you pay for your own books, and I guarantee you that 398 plus 170 dollars is going to be more than 320 plus.
The cost of books for any course number five, a positive thing: the University of Phoenix is one of the for-profits that is regionally accredited, so this degree is legitimate and, apart from the reputation of the school itself, there's no reason that this major shouldn't get you into The master's degree that you want and number six students can only take one class at a time at University of Phoenix and their classes take about five weeks, which means you'll graduate.
If you stay steady in about 200 weeks or just under four years, but most online colleges have terms that are eight weeks long in which you typically take two courses at a time which would have you graduating in 160 weeks, which means that the University of Phoenix's System like helps you stay focused, but it also kind of slows you down.
And finally, I did a lot of digging into customer review sites to see what clients and students were saying about University of Phoenix, and these were their biggest complaints, bad customer service in the call centers students felt like they were kind of being rushed through and that Nobody actually knew how to solve their problems.
People felt rushed to sign up for and pay for classes right away, which is maybe a little bit more common in online colleges in general than should be the case.
People said they got very little interaction with professors and that the overall educational experience wasn't that great, of course, for some people, I'm sure it worked out very well.
Some people didn't like the five-week long terms because they felt like they were being rushed through course material that they were really excited to learn about and number five. Let'S just go ahead and end with this quote. I was just told by a recruiter.
I should take the name of the school off my resume. I wouldn't waste your time or money. I don't like saying that schools have bad reputations, but of all the schools. I'Ve reviewed University of Phoenix has one of the worst. I'M not saying that it's going to keep you from getting job
If you know how to Market yourself, if you've got really good other skills or a great resume with great work experience, but it could potentially make it harder. So, for all of these Reasons, I'm giving Phoenix an F for student experience overall.
That averages up to University of Phoenix getting a 1.5 GPA and, if we're aiming for a 3.0 GPA at least to be able to graduate quickly and inexpensively and to hit our personal Career goals, that means that University of Phoenix is probably most likely a bad option For you, It seems to be designed to get money out of you and then forget about you.
Please stay away compared to other colleges. University of Phoenix is a trap If you want suggestions for better online colleges to check out check out this article, and if you want to get serious about graduating college 1812 or even six months from now from a reputable, solid School.
My team and I would love to help you out sign up For a consultation at the link down in the description and we will get you ready to go thanks for watching and happy hacking.
