The Education Industry Should Fear Jack Welch's New MBA Program

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  1

  Pagu

  06/24/09 | Report as spam

  RE: The Education Industry Should Fear Jack Welch's New MBA Program

  I cant talk enough about the quality of education at University of Phoenix. As a student I have enjoyed the online class atmostphere and the convenience every other student enjoy. This is one of the best online school in the United States. You get results and the quality of instructors cannot be compared with any other school, very dedicated and able to assist you succeed as well as dependable.I encurage to register for you will be very happy you did 5 years down the line. As cost of tuition is skyrocketing University of Phoenix will work with you in anyway possible in helping you fulfil your dreams. Position yourself well so that mistakes of yesterday does not repeat itself again in the future. The only way to do so is to make the first call that will change your destiny forever. I am a student.

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  ingoodcompany

  06/24/09 | Report as spam

  RE: The Education Industry Should Fear Jack Welch's New MBA Program

  As a graduate of University of Phoenix (Sandiego Campus, 1999), I've seen this coming for quite some time, since my first course at UoP, actually. Colleges and universities' brick & mortar mentality belies very things they teach regarding a global community driven largely by technological advancement.
  
  As well, the corporate and general business community that is crying out for mobile, agile and techno-savvy employees who can hit the ground running, working effectively in virtual team environments and always-on real time collaborative digital venues cannot long feel compelled to hire graduates from icons of monastic immobility.
  
  While I am not ready to yield to the idea that chair-hours are dead, the idea that top-of-the-line learning is exclusive to marble tiled hallowed halls is all but dead. In addition, the distance between what colleges produce and what employers need is growing, while the ability of post secondary institutions to reconfigure brick and mortar systems to address changing needs in an environment of global geometric accelerative change is strained to the limit. What Welch is apparently doing is developing his own workforce as the universities have apparently failed to produce students of the quality and with the speed he needs.
  
  What's more, as technology advances, high school systems are increasingly graduating cyber-schooled teens. It becomes less of a stretch to imagine that a workforce could be on the horizon that has never seen a school building, and may never see the inside of a physical office building.
  
  Welch's MBA program is the camel's nose in the tent, but it may not be the tent you think. Rather than just the cap&gown business, to see what that camel is probably sniffing after, look at the Apollo Group's (APOL) stock. Apollo is the largest for-profit education company, University of Phoenix being its core school, with campuses and learning centers in 39 states as well as various international locations. When I was there in the late 90s, the stock was trading at $16, ran up to around $88, and is now about $65 and on the way back up.

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  GettingInTune

  08/07/09 | Report as spam

  RE: The Education Industry Should Fear Jack Welch's New MBA Program

  I would see this development in education a little more critically. I would fully agree that higher education and its traditional, ivory-tower approaches to teaching and learning need to be transformed. However, taking this basic model and giving it an "e-facade" is not a genuine transformation.
  
  Let me explain by taking a look at the short list of the supposed (most important?) differences Deeran offers. I would say that most universities offer paper and digitized homework, writing and research guides through their student centers. There is no fundamental difference between a paper quiz and a virtual quiz. Whether on campus or online, you are going to be with other people in your field and thus build a community. Most universities have a well-curated library that, nowadays, also offers a range of online resources.
  
  And I would agree with ingoodcompany that globalized commerce needs people who can work effectively in virtual teams, and virtual universities will certainly give students more practice. However, the up-and-coming generations will not have any trouble adapting to new technologies, and besides, the main purpose of higher education can hardly be defined as giving students the opportunity to work on e-platforms.
  
  Deeran's article above offers a link to the BusinessWeek article that quotes Jack Welch, who speaks about what he feels are the differences between his online program and a brick & mortar university, for example: "In the budgeting part there will be a view of conventional budgeting and a view of budgeting my way, and students can debate the two". Again, fundamentally, there is no real difference in the didactic approach here, and both campus and online forms can be equally rigorous. The only difference is that the students get to hear Welch's perspective on things. But is the point of higher education to develop robots (ingoodcompany wrote that Welch wants to develop "his own workforce") who play to Welch's pipe? As Jack Welch says himself in that BusinessWeek article, he comes from a very traditional background, and this traditional background is reflected in his ideas for his school: they are simply not visionary enough.
  
  The basic problem is that universites are still seen as conveyors of knowledge and skills, and if some sort of serious transformation isn't called for, then the new e-universities will only perpetuate what has been common practice for the last 600 years. I believe the answer we are looking for lies behind some very powerful statements made by educators like Prof. William Ouchi of the Anderson School (UCLA): "...we need to be an independent voice; we need ? by our research, by our teaching, by our writing and our speaking ? to attempt not simply to mirror or to analyze what companies do, but rather to attempt to elevate the practice of management" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jV0AUjx6Ik&eurl=http://www.youtube.com/v/1jV0AUjx6Ik&hl=zh_TW&fs=1&feature=player_embedded). In order to follow Ouchi's call, we are going to have to fundamentally transform the way we do education. But that's a little trickier to do and requires a level of collaborative thought and interaction that, unfortunately, most of us would probably never have experienced during our own education, whether on campus or online.
  

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  waxmiami

  08/22/09 | Report as spam

  RE: The Education Industry Should Fear Jack Welch's New MBA Program

  One thing you should consider is if the university is accredited. The main accreditations for most of the universities and colleges are the ones provided by CHEA (Council for Higher Education Accreditation) and its 4 major regional organizations, The Southern, Western, Northern and North Central. Universities such as Hardvard, Columbia, New York, Penn, UM, USC, UF, etc. are accredited by CHEA.
  
  I dont know exactly what kind of accreditation University of Phoenix has but you should make sure is accredited by the organizations shown above. Reason being that when you try to transfer from a university that is not accredited by CHEA sometimes the new institution you are trasnfering to does not accept you credits. This is something extremley important, especially if you are planning to pursue your degree, either Bacherlor's, Master or Phd.
  
  And of course, beware of the scams.. There are a lot of universities advertising in the web that has no accreditation or are accredited by a strange organization that is not qualified.