From: Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
My job offers educational reimbursement that I am seriously considering to use to go for a Masters degree, in order to break the cycle of underemployment I'm in. We recently picked up a new person in our department that has an MBA from the University of Phoenix (the O-L people). Are there any opinions on this sort of program? How is an MBA from them viewed by potential employers? How legitimate is it?
My employer recently let a few presenters from the U. of Phoenix come in to discuss the
school and its assorted programs. The HR people promoted the event well, and a lot of people
showed up to listen to what they had to say. (myself included) The amount it was
promoted internally speaks pretty well for U of P, considering that my comapny has never done
that before, and that they would be the one paying the bills for the courses anyone decided
to take.
But U of P has just opened several campuses locally here in the Boston area, so most of
the focus for us was on the in-person courses rather than the online ones. I assume the
online courses and degrees would be at least somewhat similar.
Unfortunately for us, a lot of the people that showed up (like me), were engineering types
interested in technical courses, while U of P seems to be pretty exclusively business-related
stuff, such as MBA's.
My impressions:
- they're very focused on non-traditional students. It seems they can give course credit for
life experience and work experience. That might be more for bachelor's-level degrees than
MBA's, but I'm not sure.
- I kinda got the impression that most of the coursework was focused on "real-world" tasks and
performance. Ie: you do case studies, reports, analyses, presentations, business plans, etc,
rather than take tests. That's a selling point of theirs: that their students graduate with practical
and useful knowledge they can put to immediate use. Also, the instructors are all required to have
"real-world" experience, they aren't the academic-types.
- The coursework also seemed very team-oriented: you do most of this work as part of a team
of 4students, rather than by yourself. I don't know how that would work for on-line students, so
that may be different, there
- Overall, I got the impression that while a earning degree from them wouldn't be terribly challenging,
they are legitimate, respectable degree programs. That's all just my impression, though. You might get some feel by observing that graduate from there that's in your department. Does he know his stuff?
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