Let my start by saying that I was an enrollment advisor for University of Phoenix Online, and AXIA/WIU Online under Apollo Group for 3 years. I recently quit from my position as one of their highest paid advisors. Paid on the amount of enrollments I did in 2003. I also completed my MBA/MKT while there.

For all of you in this forum defending this organization, you are simply spewing ignorance and rehashing information provided you by this organization. Please stop, you are not doing any good and I am sorry to say this, but you are wrong. So wrong that it borders on ignorance.

Let defend something for a moment. The company as a whole does contain good people, some of which do try and help and have good intentions. The problem stems directly from one man the CEO, Brain Muller. He has set in motion internal policies that create a hopeless scenario for all within the organization. They either comply, lose money, or are fired. When you start threatening a person's lively hood, they will usually fall in line. This is why so many good people have had to deceive or lie to potential students, and why you see so many reports in this forum.

There are many things that can be addressed here but let's start with some basic things. Accreditation. UOP Online is Accredited by the North Central Association of the Higher Learning Commission (Perdue Shares the same body as do many other schools) However, this really does not mean anything.

Yes, UOP has their programs screened and verified by the HLC, but their accreditation is not reviewed for years. What most people do not realize is that it is extremely hard to loose accreditation once you have it. There is no active monitoring of courses or instructors. Any audits that take place require UOP be given advanced warning.

This means that can basically provide sub-par courses for outrageous prices. Yes, their classes are a joke. If you believe that college is about shooting emails back and forth via Outlook Express and working in 'Learning Teams' then you are delusional. Fact: Learning Team arose as a reaction to an audit by the Federal Government on UOP's financial aid usage. They had to require learning teams in order to maintain Title IV funding capacity.

As said before, UOPO is fully accredited, but they do not require the GMAT for the MBA programs. What does this mean? It means that they do not have AACSB Accreditation. Here is more on that: http://www.aacsb.edu/ This is why when I present my MBA to professional organizations, they laugh. Sorry to inform you, but your degree is not as valid as you want it to be.

Next I would like to address the organizations misuse of funds. They have been for many years now, embezzling monies from their employees and Title IV funding.

Let's start with Title IV. As mentioned about, they were abusing access to funding in the late 90's by claiming student living expenses on their report for on campus housing. Hmmmm, online makes that a little hard to validate. They were using this money as venture capital to finance growth and investments. They continue to do so till this day, just in a different way.

First, you must understand the accounting variables that go into a billion dollar company. There is money flying all over the place on their balance sheets. Income, expenditures, investments, etc. It is a fact that UOP has continuously decreased its amount of new enrollments each year since its peak in 2003. This is part of the reason they rolled the UOPX stock back into Apollo group last year. However, the CEO's Brain Muller and Todd Neilson still need to generate shareholder interest to keep the stock high.

Now, if there is a decrease in enrollments as compared to prior years, but the CEO is still claiming huge growth in years to come, how does the company make up for that? By counting scheduled students as enrollments for their report without every actually having those students start.

There is one problem. Smart investors can look at organizations financial statements and tell if they are losing money. So how does UOP make up the money difference in the accounting department? 2 ways. First, it decreases the pay of its employee workforce and (for years) violated AZ and Federal Overtime law by making overtime mandatory but refusing to pay employees overtime wages.

A quick search online will reveal the lawsuit filed by the AZ Dept of Labor last year and the $10 Million settle UOP had to pay. 10 Million? Sounds like a lot right? Not when you consider the amount it saves over the last 20 years by not paying overtime wages. Somewhere in the 100 million mark. Wonder how they were able to grow so rapidly?

Second, accounting is basically money in, vs money out in an organization. When you are dealing with a billion dollar company, it is hard to keep track of every dollar. One might wonder why UOP Online takes so long to distribute Title IV funding to students. They tell you it takes 2 to 3 months, this is a lie.

The money is in the hands of UOP a week or two after you attend your first day of class. Why do they take so long to distribute the funding? Two reason. One is to keep their official default rate down. Considering they lose about 30% of enrollments after the first class, it would look very bad for them if all these students started defaulting one loans they done think they need to pay back because they didn't take a full class.

So it is official UOP policy to hold the funding in accounts until the person has completed the first few weeks of class. This allows them to send the money back if the student does not complete the class without reporting anything to the lender. The student is then in debt to UOP collections and not to the lender. Not to mention, FA doesn't pay for dropped or failed courses. What of the money in the holding tanks for months at a time. Hmmmm. Well, when you have over 100,000 students, 80% of which use FA in the sum of roughly 15K per year, they are basically counting that money as income for the organization even though technically it does not belong to them yet.

What that means is that they can invest monies, gain interest or assets with money that does not belong to them. Sound illegal? Borderline, but impossible to prove through accounting audits.

Questions from the public.

Yes, advisors are trained to lie and manipulate. I did this training myself they call it the AMOPS process. It is a technique used to manipulate leads into buying a product.

Yes, advisors are paid off of the number of enrollments.
It's called the Matrix; they changed it in 2004 to look more in line with requirements of the DOE. This led to a record number of pay decreases across the board, a record turn over rate for employees, and a mass exodus of their top advisors.

No, the degree is not looked upon as being high quality. I attended the ground campus with 2 managers from Intel here in AZ and they showed me a memo that went out to their managers stating that they are no longer allowed to hire graduates of the BSIT program at UOP.

No, you will never be cleared by the collections department.

Yes, EAs will tell potential student that student loans do not need to be paid back.

Yes, the CEO once said that he wanted to be the Wal-Mart of education. Obviously without the low pricing.

No, the cost of tuition increase has nothing to do with expenses, it has to do with showing income on the books.

Yes, there is a promotion every month.

Yes, you should select your own lender and choose to have the funds distributed to you, even if that means you have to wait to start and pay for the first class out of pocket.

No the people who defend this place have no clue what they are talking about.

Yes, I know there are probably typos in this so you tards that want to point them out, save your fingers.

If you have any questions post them in here and I will check in and try to answer them.

Peace.
Oh yeah, if you want to get to the root of an issue here are the names of the top executives in the organization who promte this shady crap.
Brian Muller CEO. Vince Grell VP Enrollment, Aaron Wettstien Director North East, Trish Elliot Director NE WIU, Larry Etherington VP mkting. Brett Romeny Senior EM. Kristin Tursinni Senior EM, Nikki Fossi Director and the most viel manager of them all, Jacob Nevzoroff. The list goes on.

But you can call 1-800-366-9699 and ask to speak with them and they will transfer you. Or you can take their fist name dot their last name and add apollogrp.phx.edu on the end and that should go directly to them. Not really sure on that one though.

B
phoenix, Arizona
U.S.A.