I have had a terrible experience with the University of Phoenix Online, and in particular their Master's Degree in Secondary Education program. I did learn some useful material in the classes, but overall my experience was not worth the $450 a semester hour they are charging me. I am in the process of withdrawing now, and I hope to help others who are considering enrolling know all of the facts because the enrollment counselors will blatantly lie.
Here is a short list of problems I encountered with UOP over my less than one year stint:
1. My enrollment counselor blatently lied about me being able to be certified in Iowa and getting paid for student teaching. She said she had checked on it and student teaching was not required and my first year as a paid teacher would work. This was the main reason I decided to enroll. It is untrue.
2. During my hardest class, our teacher was stuck in the hurricanes in Florida and did not log on for over a week (of a 6 week class). Almost every student in the class contacted their academic advisors for at least 4 days during that period without a teacher. It finally took me contacting one of my previous professors (that I actually liked) to tell her the situation to get in touch with the higher ups and get us a new teacher. It was over a week before we had a new teacher given to us and THEN I heard back from my academic advisor about the situation despite the 15 emails and 10 phone calls I made to her. Everyone was given an A for the class, which sucks, because some people didn't do any of the work while the rest of us worked really hard to get everything done. We got no refunds for that class, even though I ended up teaching my classmates the material (it was a research class and I do that for a living).
3. I was told 2 days before my class was about to start that I owed $70 for "resource fees" (online books) for my next class or I wouldn't be able to take the class. This was an outright lie because that $70 I was forced to pay IMMEDIATELY was returned to me 6 weeks later when I got my next student loan check in the mail. And they were nasty about it even though I insisted that money had already been paid.
4. My last class I took actually ended 2 weeks before my schedule said it did (mess up with Christmas break time in the bookkeeping) and my next class wasn't scheduled for another month. I contacted my academic advisor (on the advice of my teacher) to change my end date and move up my start date on my next class. 4 phone calls and 7 emails over a one week period before she finally responded.
5. I emailed my academic advisor several times (and called a couple of times) to express concerns over the student teaching issue. She has not returned any phone calls or emails. I left her a pretty nasty voice message telling her I was withdrawing from the program and how useless and unprofessional I found her to be. Heh. I really should apologize, but she's made everything a lot harder than it should be and she's my ONLY contact with anyone at the University (excluding financial aid and past professors) so I have no other choice but to go through her. I finally heard back from her 5 days later after I had already decided to withdraw from the program and transfer to a new school.
I am not sure how the withdrawl process is going to go considering the lack of concern on their part, but I will try to keep everyone here informed.
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