Standards and institutional mission lost. Phoenix removed its enrollment requirements and began placing more emphasis on two-year degrees to students regardless of age or work experience through Axia College. A university with over two decades of experience catering to one type of student immediately started enrolling anyone it could. As former Phoenix Senior Vice President John Murphy wrote in his book Mission Forsaken, “It was a money-spinning financial decision, but a cheerless academic disaster.”
The Education Department data show what an academic disaster looks like in numerical terms. Take Phoenix’s associate degree in office management and supervision. It is the second-largest associate degree program offered by any institution in the country. And more than 9,800 of the 27,500 students who started making payments on federal student loans for this program from October 2008 through the following September ended up defaulting on their debt by the fall of 2012. These individuals had their credit ruined and balances inflated through a host of fees and penalties, and will almost certainly never be able to discharge their debts through bankruptcy.
The office management and supervision program is just one of 20 programs at Phoenix with a default rate of 30 percent or higher. This represents over 32,200 individuals — about the same size as the University of Alabama. Every single one of these programs offers an associate degree. It even includes programs that should have direct market payoff, such as network systems administration (default rate of 44 percent) and information technology (42 percent).
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/30/profit-colleges-went-astray-should-return-their-roots-essay#ixzz33nNsvIpP
Inside Higher Ed