Industrial education

The NYT exposes the dark, Satanic degree mills of the University of Phoenix. What's not to love about this institution? 300,000 students taught by a near-total part-time faculty; a "low overhead" approach to higher education; centralized course planning; professors with real-life experience in... uh,... something:

Robert Wancha, 42, a former National Guard commander who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in information technology at the university’s Detroit campus, said that in a computer course last fall his instructor, Christopher G. Stanglewicz, had boasted that he had a doctorate but did little teaching, instead assigning students to work in learning teams while he toyed with his computer.

Mr. Stanglewicz, reached at his home, acknowledged that he had covered only a fraction of the syllabus , partly, he said, because the university required him to cram too much information into too few sessions.

“Students get overwhelmed,” he said. Mr. Stanglewicz asserted in the interview that he had earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Kentucky. But the authorities there said his name was not in their records. (Dr. Pepicello said that Mr. Stanglewicz had never told the university that he had a doctorate, and that he was qualified to teach.)

I don't know what horrifies me more: that the University of Phoenix is willing to hire any schmoe of the street without checking his credentials (or even bothering to ask, apparently), or that Mr. Stanglewicz was whipping out his faux-doctorate to dazzle the folks in "a computer course."

Education on the cheap, it sure don't look pretty.