As with others, I also received the hard sell pitch from a representative of their company when I expressed interest in their online degrees. However, being there were no colleges in my area that were offering Bachelor Degrees in the field I was pursuing, I chose to go with AIU.
Problem one — Even though I explicitly explained to my phone advisor that I was not going to be financially able to contribute anything beyond the Federal Loans and Pell Grants, and believed that they would cover tuition costs, I found myself owing another two thousand dollars at the end twenty weeks (2 ten week A & B sessions). All because they assumed I would be qualified for a loan that I ended up not being qualified for. It took several calls to straighten this out and I ended up applying for another personal loan to cover the amount. Something I wasn't pleased about, but I didn't want to give up in the middle.
Of course, if someone had told me that it would only be another two months and I'd find myself in the same situation, I may not have put myself another two thousand in debt. This time, I cannot secure another personal loan (this time for a remaining 4 thousand that isn't covered by Federal Loans and because of the way Pell Grants are paid out, and the shortness of the accelerated program. I only qualified for a lousy $675 in Pell monies instead of $4400) So, I notified my advisor and the financial aid department at the end of last session that I had to withdraw (at least until July when Pell grants are paid out so I could hope to cover more of the tuition). It's been three weeks now and they STILL haven't gotten around to confirming that they withdrew me from their courses. I'm instructed not to log on... Which I have followed. But without logging on, I have no idea if they have charged me for this semester or not, regardless of me informing them before the session started that I could not continue at this time.
Besides the tuition of $5,000 per session and additional cost of $700 per session for books (I almost choked when I saw that on the student account bill), and even though I have maintained a 4.0 GPA... I have not been that thrilled about the whole AIU online college experience. Basically you are sent books and more or less teach yourself how to do things. Two classes a week are run by the academia that run the course (not mandatory to attend) and I found most times the classes were not really that helpful.in a few of the classes, I found that the work I was producing was better than the teacher's examples that they had done themselves (not very encouraging, is it?) The section of the website had a "Classroom Materials" section that did have step-by-step lessons, but were rather limited and without a cable connection were very sluggish to run. And I won't even get into what it was like trying to do group projects with five other individuals that left things till the last minute to do and were in different time zones.
Their academic advisors and customer service is deplorable. As I mentioned earlier, I'm still waiting to be contacted after 3 weeks of trying and I only get replies via e-mail when I contact them two or three times.
I just think that for what it costs to attend this program, they could be more forthcoming and attentive to their students. But I guess it's all about that bottom line and it feels like now that they won't be getting those loan dispursements, they could care less about me anymore... At least not enough to even return a phone call or reply to an e-mail.
0 comments