Biden Administration Gets Something Right!!

[Deleted User 9015]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/britneyngu ... 4dd4e41050

These universities, especially GCU, Liberty, any of the private ones posing as Christian schools, they really are exploiting their students. Frankly, I believe that GCU and Liberty should both be shuttered for the outright financial abuse their students encounter.

At the risk of disclosing too much personal information, I own a business that does consulting work with people working in academia and doctoral students. We do take on some Master's students, but that is terribly rare because the style of their final project is typically very different from what someone will do for a dissertation or journal article (a dissertation is essentially a journal article where you cover more pedantic bases to give evidence that you know what you're doing and more details that the scholarly agenda is based on the existence of a fecundity of research among scholars in a specific topic area). Our business involves consulting on the development of a topic foundation, identifying key literature supporting the topic, and designing a plan of action for actual research. We also will do analysis within ethical guidelines.

The experiences that we have had can be sort of aligned along three different groups: The professional researchers, who are basically people in faculty (or sometimes administrative) positions at traditional public and private universities, the traditional students, who are students at the traditional, mainly on-ground college, like an MSU, U of M, CMU, etc. and online students, who are the people who go to schools such as GCU, Liberty, Phoenix, Capella, Walden, etc. The projects for professional researchers and traditional students are typically quite similar. We are able to develop a topic for them and design a research strategy that comports with investigating a problem that has not yet been studied, or at least not to a sufficient degree. All of these people are easily satisfied and working with them through the process is simple and painless. They make the work fun.

The problem is that more than half of our clients are people who attend these garbage online private schools.

Every project involving these students is living hell. These schools sell students into their programs by telling these people that with the doctoral degree they will make tens of thousands a year more than they currently make. Most of the people in these programs are in EdD, DBA, or some form of education or business PhD degree program. Some are in like PsyD, social work or psych PhD programs. The DNP is becoming increasingly popular as well. This won't make people happy, but while there are plenty of teachers, business professionals, social workers, therapists, and nurses who are bright and hard-working, there is a gigantic cluster of these people who are the absolute dumbest among us.

First, many of these people should have never been admitted into a doctoral program. Often, and I am not bullshitting, these people are barely able to spell their own name. The reason why they have reached out to us is because they have gone several semesters of failing to achieve a satisfactory mark on any section of their dissertation and their chair has told them to find someone to help them write it (which basically means "find a ghostwriter" something we do not do). So, when these people reach out to us, they are way over their head and about $100k in debt (but it doesn't matter to them because its student loan money) and our first consulting call with them basically involves explaining to them the basics like what a variable is or the difference between a survey or an interview. They cry, get mad that their school never helped them, all that. Typically, we will sign them on to help.

Second, these schools will do all they can to place barriers between the student and successful completion of their project. Let's take GCU for example. GCU has a template they use for their dissertations that includes a rubric for each section. One would think that such a thing would be conducive to the success of students. The problem is the subjectivity of measurement, the number of items, and how they assess. I have seen some horrible dissertations from the school, but also have had leads come in with very strong proposals where they were still being rated as unsatisfactory. These people would make whatever minor changes that were required, but then receive new feedback on changes to different, unrelated sections. So basically, what the school does is they play out the clock on these people. So when they come to us, we really can't do anything for them. After, what is often two-three years in their dissertation courses, they have a document that looks very solid, but their committees gaslight the absolute hell out of them so they don't know what to do. Their feedback doesn't cultivate learning. Then after 2-3 years, the document basically gets thrown into the fire and they have to start over again because these schools will require that the students cite 3 gap papers (a gap paper is a journal article with evidence of a research gap that the dissertation will fill) and that these gap papers be within the past 3-5 years (depending on the chair). And they require citations be within the past five years, so eventually all the citations age out. So they either start over or drop out.

There's more to say, but I believe this is boring enough. The doctoral experience should be a mentoring experience. I was lucky enough to work with my mentor as a doctoral fellow for years while I was completing coursework and my dissertation. These people pay to attend a party where they are essentially the schmuck being exploited. If you are paying for a graduate degree, especially a doctoral degree, no one will respect you.

tl;dr: When you run schools like a business, don't be surprised when the consumer gets their asshole gaped.