Cheap Education Courses at Brandman University

[sanantone]

Brandman University's extended education division offers academic and professional development courses. Most of their academic courses are graduate-level education courses that cost $525 per course plus a one-time fee for LiveText membership and $150 for certificate conferral. 

https://www.brandman.edu/extended-education

[Life Long Learning]

Sanantone

Looks like their MA in Org Leadership (MAOL) can be done in 7 courses for public safety and military types.  Is this an OK school?

[sanantone]

It's just like any other no-name school. I know someone will be tempted to come in here with links to worthless rankings from marketing websites that accept money from schools to be featured. Don't be fooled by those.

[dfrecore]

It's just like any other no-name school. I know someone will be tempted to come in here with links to worthless rankings from marketing websites that accept money from schools to be featured. Don't be fooled by those.

Like US News & World Report?  Ugh!  Don't fall for it - they are paid for those rankings!

[sanantone]

It's just like any other no-name school. I know someone will be tempted to come in here with links to worthless rankings from marketing websites that accept money from schools to be featured. Don't be fooled by those.

Like US News & World Report?  Ugh!  Don't fall for it - they are paid for those rankings!

You can't pay for a high spot on US News. If that were the case, University of Phoenix would have had more than enough money to pay for a number one spot, but they aren't even ranked. 

The criticism US News receives is not that schools can pay for a spot in the rankings; it's that the criteria for the rankings are not telling of a school's quality. US News relies a lot on prestige and the quality of the students. They don't really look at outcomes or the quality of teaching. It's also easy for schools to game the system by encouraging more people to apply in order to lower their acceptance rates and by raising the minimum SAT/ACT scores. A couple of schools have been caught lying about the SAT scores of their accepted students, and they were kept out of the rankings for a year. I'm sure they would have just paid for a higher spot if that were a possibility, but it's not. 

But, with all the weaknesses of US News' methodology, it's just a fact of life that we have to deal with. No one cares about the rankings on Bestcolleges.com or College Factual. The T14 law schools are based on US News rankings. With oversaturation in the legal market, if you don't attend a top school, your chance of finding a good job is not good. Big 4 accounting firms aren't deciding which schools to recruit from based on GetEducated.com rankings or even US News best online college rankings. They're looking at US News business school and accounting program rankings. When academics are hired, US News is referenced. 

If you just want to know if a school is not going to rip you off or if it has good customer service, then I don't think any ranking system is going to help you. It's better to look at reviews. Otherwise, when you're dealing with non-traditional schools, there's really not much of a difference in the education quality.

[dfrecore]

It's just like any other no-name school. I know someone will be tempted to come in here with links to worthless rankings from marketing websites that accept money from schools to be featured. Don't be fooled by those.

Like US News & World Report?  Ugh!  Don't fall for it - they are paid for those rankings!

You can't pay for a high spot on US News. If that were the case, University of Phoenix would have had more than enough money to pay for a number one spot, but they aren't even ranked. 

The criticism US News receives is not that schools can pay for a spot in the rankings; it's that the criteria for the rankings are not telling of a school's quality. US News relies a lot on prestige and the quality of the students. They don't really look at outcomes or the quality of teaching. It's also easy for schools to game the system by encouraging more people to apply in order to lower their acceptance rates and by raising the minimum SAT/ACT scores. A couple of schools have been caught lying about the SAT scores of their accepted students, and they were kept out of the rankings for a year. I'm sure they would have just paid for a higher spot if that were a possibility, but it's not. 

But, with all the weaknesses of US News' methodology, it's just a fact of life that we have to deal with. No one cares about the rankings on Bestcolleges.com or College Factual. The T14 law schools are based on US News rankings. With oversaturation in the legal market, if you don't attend a top school, your chance of finding a good job is not good. Big 4 accounting firms aren't deciding which schools to recruit from based on GetEducated.com rankings or even US News best online college rankings. They're looking at US News business school and accounting program rankings. When academics are hired, US News is referenced. 

If you just want to know if a school is not going to rip you off or if it has good customer service, then I don't think any ranking system is going to help you. It's better to look at reviews. Otherwise, when you're dealing with non-traditional schools, there's really not much of a difference in the education quality.

You are right - I shouldn't have said they're paid - but that the ranking are rigged, and their system is fixed.  School pay to do things to get them moved up in the rankings - things that have nothing to do with student outcomes.  They figure out how to cheat the system.  USNWR also penalizes schools who won't participate in the madness.  And it's known that "insiders" play along and skew the rankings.

[jsd]

Was it the US News rankings that used to (does?) count post-graduation employment in it's formula, and schools were gaming it by just hiring their own graduates for short periods of time? I have a fuzzy memory of something of this sort, might have been specific to law school rankings

[sanantone]

Was it the US News rankings that used to (does?) count post-graduation employment in it's formula, and schools were gaming it by just hiring their own graduates for short periods of time? I have a fuzzy memory of something of this sort, might have been specific to law school rankings

I don't know, but I think you can game anything other than post-college, subject matter tests. With some professions, this is already built in due to licensure requirements i.e. medicine, law, and public accountancy. I think one of the best measures would be comparisons of pre-tests and post-tests. 

On the sister forum, Kizmet posted an article written by a guy lauding the Shanghai Index as a much better ranking than the U.S. News. So, I looked at the criteria and determined that there wouldn't be much of a difference between the rankings. Guess what? There wasn't much of a difference. The Shanghai Index looks at things such as the number of Nobel Prize winners. Well, when you only admit geniuses and near geniuses, you're going to have more Nobel Prize winners.