“Our aim is to always help students meet their education goals efficiently and cost-effectively,” said Cohen. It also shows a student and alumni body that was diverse and resilient, continuing on their academic paths and utilizing the career and life resources that the University provides. The report reveals numerous ways that University of Phoenix adapted to the challenges of the year and overcame them. University of Phoenix’s 2020 Academic Annual Report paints a picture of high student satisfaction and success rates, of goals met or exceeded, and of connections strengthened, in spite of the disruptions caused by the pandemic to home, work and society. As the COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary for other institutions to pivot to digital formats in 2020, University of Phoenix spent the year innovating its online academic experience even further and sharing its expertise in online teaching with educators across the country in need of guidance. Now, University of Phoenix is one of the largest universities of its kind. Since 1989, University of Phoenix has offered online classes, long before other institutions were doing it and before most people even had email. It’s a cynical, expensive and dead-end revolving door that, thankfully, at least one government agency is interested in stopping.University of Phoenix had a distinct advantage when the COVID-19 pandemic forced academic institutions to shift to virtual learning. Meanwhile, for-profit schools such as UoPx continue to collect billions of dollars in tax-payer grants and billions more in tax-payer backed loans, spending those dollars on aggressive advertising to new students – not teaching, not investing in research but recruiting more students who can pay more tuition and take out more loans. And right on cue, within hours of the announcement of the FTC and UoPx settlement, DeVos announced policies making it more difficult if not impossible for defrauded students to get their debt written down. Those need to be discharged by ED – Secretary DeVos’s ED. If anything, they’ve actively, repeatedly and by design made it easier for for-profit schools to evade scrutiny and keep the loans and taxpayer funds flowing.įor example, the $140 million in student debt that the FTC managed to erase in the settlement was debt owed to the school, not federal student loans. In it she said, “The FTC cannot be the sole bulwark to protect consumers whom bad actors increasingly victimize for profit only to be abandoned by the very government agency best able to help.” Slaughter said there “appears to be a complete abdication by the Department of Education, which has oversight of for-profit institutions and controls their access to federal financial aid.”Īs Slaughter also pointed out, ED has not really been absent. Largely unreported was the statement issued by Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Commissioner at the FTC, about the UoPx settlement. Or that it takes, on average, nine years to get a four-year degree from a for-profit school, if you get one at all. Or that the quality of education at for-profits is grossly substandard. Surely, the Department of Education (ED) must care that students were being, according to the FTC, lied to and defrauded. There is simply no reason for them not to.Īnd that’s the second point – this case was brought and settled by the FTC, over ads. The FTC’s point was that for-profit schools such as UoPx will continue to push as hard as they can until someone stops them. The school and its owners, the FTC said, “have been unjustly enriched” through those ads and “are likely to continue to injure consumers, reap unjust enrichment, and harm the public interest” if the court did not act.
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