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Trying to learn more about a college
Yoshua
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I am trying to learn more about a potential school my wife and I may attend. Everything sounds good, but some online reviews have cast some doubts. However this is the internet and I am somewhat jaded to the whims and wiles of the internet.
The school is Charter College. All I really know is they are a private school founded in Alaska in 1985. I am wondering if anyone has had experience with this school, good or bad.
The school is Charter College. All I really know is they are a private school founded in Alaska in 1985. I am wondering if anyone has had experience with this school, good or bad.
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One the next level, this is a proprietary school and is by nature predatory. They will ensure you get admitted but have no lasting commitment or incentive to ensuring you do anything but pay for more classes. Tuition is likely to be slightly less than at a public institution, but so too will be quality. Many times classroom fees are substantial and financial aid is somewhat rigged to ensure you pay high interest rates. Make sure you do your research should you go to a private institution. It is possible to get a solid degree from one, but you have to be alert to the dangers.
As someone who works with incoming student populations at a major public university, there is a strong reason proprietary holds the degree of mistrust they have earned. Many students I advise have wasted years on misadvised classes from such institutions (even accredited ones) as their programs will pad classes to ensure enrollment numbers are satisfied so the bottom line is kept. Public institutions do not have any reason or metric to incentivize you to do anything but ensure you graduate quickly and efficiently.
I appreciate the feedback. My biggest fear has been wasting time on a degree or certification that proves to be ultimately worthless (even if I got something out of the classes). More worried about the money side on my wife's end since she would be dipping into her VA benefits to pay for it (at least somewhat), my end would be covered by tuition assistance through the military.
My experience with Seattle Central Community was not that great. One of my teachers was a pompous ass who deemed us beneath her and the class itself demeaning to what she wanted to teach (it was a algebra class). My chemistry class there was probably the most boring, pointless class I ever took. The teacher put zero effort into it, basically he just read from the text book for lectures and all assignments were straight from the text book as well. Now this all happened awhile ago, so perhaps things have improved.
Charter promises to help with job placement both during and after classes. I know the public colleges have services in this area as well, but I will say I was never impressed by what they offered (granted, this was mid 90's, it may have improved).
I really hate to see someone waste their GI benefits on this type of thing, as for profit colleges have a tendency to prey on military families.
I would research this very carefully, up to contacting potential employers in your area to see if they hire graduates from this system.
https://uaonline.alaska.edu/banprod/owa/bwsk2tcr.P_Tcs_Search
Also I am having a devil of time figuring out how much this place actually costs, though I really don't want to enter any personal information in their dumb tool.
The only academic program I'm qualified to judge is the BS CS, which for all intents and purposes looks like a joke.
I would steer clear of this place.
Look, I had shitty professors at my college too. I had some awesome ones too. Like many things in life, it varies.
Addendum: I downloaded the course catalog. This is pretty rich. They misspelled "Turing machines" as "Turning Machines". Web design as a senior level class! A course on Linux administration! I'm not saying these aren't valid topics, but they're not computer science.
Professor personality problems in lower level courses will be universal at any institution. Typically you won't get the "good" ones until you are a sophomore or higher and are taking major related courses rather than general education courses. GEP courses (the common core) are typically taught by new teachers, teachers on probation of some kind, or GTAs. Teachers with experience and skill tend to focus on teaching their upper level discipline courses. At proprietary schools all professors tend to be in the new teacher range, or are washouts from research institutions that lost their positions for some reason. For profit schools pay their teachers crap in 90% of cases, most are simply adjuncting on the side while working at a high school or community college in the area teaching GEP courses.
No for-profit college will offer actual placement. The help they typically do is simply farming you out to a temp agency that is a subsidiary company to them to do marginal white collar work. This way they can employ all of their students via the temp agency at terrible rates but still claim 90% placement or such nonsense. (A famous one in my area, a fairly well known for-profit digital media school, used to do something similar for "game design" back in the late 90s where they would just farm all of their digital media, programming, and writing students to do a 3 month paid QA position with local companies. Most would be fired after 3 months, but the school could claim huge placement rates. They were forced to knock it off after the state accreditation agency found out a few years later, but such practices are common).
Public institutions typically have a career services office that will do something similar to a private placement agency in that they will assist with job searching (CDFs(Career Development Facilitator) are common in my region, which is a form of career counselor that requires a bit of training to get the credential) of neat (and free) resources for searching for employment, career fairs, and interview/resume assistance and preparation, but how much you get out of these typically is more to do with what you put in rather than the other way around. My state's institution has an online networking system that show ratios if placement and job needs for our majors across the state in both visual and spreadsheet form. Many other states have similar programs (with a lot of the Pacific NW and New England putting what we have to shame through better funding).
Honestly, your VA benefits will be better used by the public system because we have federal requirements to have a funded Veterans Advisement center at every public university. I can only speak for the ones at my institution, but here they are the highest regulated, highest paid, and most useful advising resource on campus. It's pretty great for the students who qualify.
A few years back I applied for a national chain of for-profit schools for a position on a new campus doing what I currently do and was offered a position what would have been a considerable pay raise at the time. Upon doing the interview and learning more about the job, their "academic advisor" positions were less about ensuring students were completing their degrees and more about tracking down students that were washing out of major universities or who were in "special target" groups to convince them to enroll in the school. Bonuses would be paid for ensuring these "special target" groups met the semesterly quotas, which were fairly sizable. In fact, one of the selling points about the position was that "admissions advisors" actually were paid more than all but administrative faculty. When I asked why the quotas were so high compared to the student body the reply was "because we will only get one or two semesters before they fail or run out of money, so we need fresh blood regularly." No joke, this was pretty much the exact response from the hiring manager.
Special Target groups included:
I turned down the position, and the much needed $20-25k annual salary increase, because I knew if I worked there I would go home every day hating myself. Consider that when you speak with the advisors over the phone and see how "friendly and supportive" they are to incoming students. Also consider how that attitude changes as you approach graduation or are hitting a rough patch mid-semester, as they are no longer financially incentiveized to get you on the hook.
Think about it: if a school has the resources to run a spider that searches to references to it online then post, a significant, disproportionate amount of their budget is going to marketing, with all the impacts to education you'd expect. Any private "career college" is going to fleece you.