My wife is a Librarian and we had to move across the state in order for her to get a Masters in LIS that was accredited by the American Library Association. In order to work at any Library in the US as a professional librarian your Masters has to be accredited by the ALA. Any library that doesn't hire ALA librarians will be blacklisted from things like inter-library loans, and some book vendors. They are very serious about these this and do not play around. There are also many unaccredited programs out there, mainly from diploma mills, that will essentially make you unhireable as anything other than the little old lady that pushes the book cart.
Every time the library does a round of hiring, there are always a few people who leave the interviews in tears because they find out that they've just spent around $40,000 on an advanced degree that will pretty much guarantee that they cannot work in their chosen field. It's heart wrenching for her and that's why we both hate the idea of diploma mills. They take advantage of people who just want to make their lives better. They promise them an easy online solution to their problems where they can go to school according to their time frame while working full-time and raising a family. They suck up all of their free time, load them up with expensive private student loans, and in the end give them degrees that make people who got a real education chuckle. It's exploitation and it's wrong.
There are ways that a working adult can finish their education but it's not easy and it takes sacrifice. Every day people flood my wife's computer lab working on online degrees. They're often homeless, unemployed, or otherwise barely scraping by. One of the services the library offers is proofreading papers. More often than not the papers she sees are awful, the student is borderline illiterate but in their second or third year. We're talking papers that wouldn't have been accepted in middle school. That means that they're turning this garbage in and getting a passing grade.
Here's a dirty little secret about for-profit schools. If you're homeless but not a convicted felon you can qualify for all kinds of federal student aid. Now I'm not against homeless people bettering themselves but the truth is that you don't become long-term homeless unless you have a serious mental illness or addiction. For-profits load them up with financial aid, let them waste a few semesters, and then laugh all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, that aid money is now lost instead of going to a serious student.
For all throughs that a bad mouthing UofP then let me cover few points for your. Expecially those that are in a possition to hire people and passing them over because you think its a shortcut degree. ITS NOT
UofP is there for fully time employees to improve there education and get better jobs. My local community college has over 2000 students on the waiting list for general ed classes.
I have worked for major corporations and small business and I've done contract jobs for the goverment. A+ is a waste, MSCP = worth investment, UofP = worth the investment if your know what your going to use the degree for. Lockheed, Northrop & Boeing place great value on Devry, ITT & UofP. as for fortune 500 companys is they dont its just there lose. If I had to choose from two people with identical resumes except one went to UofP and the other UCLA. UofP hands down.
I'm not trying to be mean, and god knows my spelling and grammar aren't perfect, but I would make a better effort when defending the college that I went to. What you said might be kind of true but I would be willing to bet that they're hiring people that got vocational skills at these schools. Vocational skills like aircraft mechanic maybe? These are skills that you could have gotten much cheaper at a Community College or from the military. I doubt that they're hiring any C-level employees that got their MBA from UoP. Let me ask you something, would you hire an aircraft mechanic that got their training online at UoP and never actually did any hands-on training? I'm sorry that Community Colleges are having trouble is CA right now but that's probably a pretty recent development. Maybe it's worth the wait.
The bottom line is that these schools carry a strong stigma against them within professional and educated circles. Like I said earlier, it doesn't matter how hard it actually was. These schools are known diploma mills in the same way that Lindsay Lohan is a known drug user. It may or may not be true but that is the perception and that is what you'll be judged on. If you're applying for a job that having a degree really is just a check mark, like civil service or other GS jobs, then a UoP degree might not hurt you. Also, if you're trying to get a job that doesn't normally require a degree it might give you a leg up. If you have two people who've both worked at McDonalds for ten years, one with a UoP degree and one without, the one with the degree might be more likely to be made the new manager. If your goal is to be in middle-management or higher at a mid to large corporation then you might have a much harder road ahead of you.
What ratio do you think they have of online versus in class students? Sorry, but that argument's only kind of valid on the surface. If you scratch a little deeper then it falls apart.
