At Higher Ed Watch, Ben Miller has an invaluable post on the University of Phoenix, the for-profit college whose ads for online classes are so ubiquitous (including, occasionally, on this blog). Unsurprisingly, Phoenix's new self-study of its students' performance is far from rigorous: While at first glance the data shows that Phoenix "freshmen" make significant academic gains by their "senior" year, in actuality the university didn't track the same students throughout their experience with the school, but instead compared the performance of beginning students to those already nearing the end of their course of study. A "freshman" might have been a 19-year old with a GED, while a "senior" could have been a middle-aged manager with over a decade of work experience.
The university also downplayed one of the most troubling aspects of for-profit higher ed: Students' high default rate on tuition loans, which far out paces loan defaults at public colleges and private not-for-profits. As Miller writes, "In reality, attending Phoenix is similar to taking out a sub-prime mortgage instead of obtaining a widely available subsidized loan from a local non-profit lender -- in this case a community college."
--Dana Goldstein
