I’ve been receiving comment spam lately from degreeusa.com (under the cover of other URLs), who claim an affiliation with the University of Phoenix (note the alternate non-.edu URL). Usually, I don’t worry too much about comment spam: just put them into MT-Blacklist (my personal blocklist now has over 2,000 entries, with many naughty words) and go along my merry way. But this comment spam I found particularly irritating, because it associated itself with for-profit education. Now, I’ve taught for the for-profit UMass Division of Continuing Education (note the non-.edu URL), and I have to say, I don’t much like them, both for the way they treat their teachers, and for the downright nasty practices they’ve historically engaged in against academic labor. But maybe this example will highlight the particular problems I see with online for-profit education:
One semester, I taught a face-to-face introductory-level literature course through UMass Continuing Ed; the following year, I taught the exact same course entirely online — I never met the students — for the same pay. The only difference: when I looked at the course catalog, I saw that Continuing Ed charged twice as much for the online version of the course. Note that they provided no computers, no classrooms, no materials, nothing except an online course management system for which UMass had already purchased a campus-wide license. In other words, they incurred no extra costs for offering the online version, they declared that my online course materials belonged to them once the course was done, and they charged students twice as much for the privilege of not meeting in a classroom. (When I look at their current offerings, the per-credit price disparity between online and face-to-face courses is smaller, but still rather substantial.) Tech cheerleaders point to the productive possibilities offered by digital technologies; these same technologies — due in part to our perceptions of them — also offer increased possibilities for exploitation.
I should point out, though, that the University of Phoenix isn’t looking for people like me, or like my students. They’ve got a very business-heavy orientation, marketing their courses towards “busy professionals”, and that’s a part of my dislike for them, since they’re kind of exploiting their students, too: one testimonial gushes, “Most of my study was done in hotel rooms in Bangkok, Beijing, Lima, Zurich, and London,” and I’m like, Is this really a good way to learn, or just a good way for your boss to run you ragged by having you doing work and school at the same time? (My first year of grad school, I worked 40 hours a week in downtown Pittsburgh and took three evening seminars each semester. I think the only reason I had the stamina for it was that I’d just finished four years in the Army as an NCO.) I look at for-profit online education, and the only people who I see really profiting are the executive officers of the University of Phoenix and of its parent corporation, the Apollo Group, whose stock has soared — in ten years — from 72 cents per share to more than 80 dollars per share.
Still, as I’ve come to understand from the writings of Clark Kerr, Derek Bok, and others, the world of higher education is never separate from or beyond economic concerns, as much as many might wish it were so. There’s something possibly problematic or contradictory, then, in the dislike I hold for institutions of for-profit online higher education, and this would certainly seem to demand further thought on my part.
For the time being, however, I’ll simply wonder: why does the Apollo Group need to resort to the same marketing techniques used by pornographers and peddlers of herbal viagra? Should any student even want to take a course from an institution that employs such techniques? Could these techniques be what the Standard & Poor’s stock report on the Apollo Group mentions as “dishonest business practices”? What exactly is the connection between degreeusa.com, which goes to considerable lengths to pimp the virtues of the University of Phoenix, and the Apollo Group? (Note that an alternate URL for the University of Phoenix is classesusa.com.) Does the Apollo Group’s board of directors have even the slightest understanding of rhetorical ethos, or why hawking their courses via weblog comment spam might be an extremely poor advertising strategy?
You know, Todd Nelson, I think I’d have to suggest that the first-year students in my College Writing class have considerably more rhetorical savvy than you and the folks at your organization. But there’s still one slot left in my 1 PM section, if you’re interested.
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