So, the June 2010 issue of Good Housekeeping has a big expose on for-profit colleges, article titled "School of Hard Knocks". It goes into a pretty good amount of detail on how these schools find their students (with recruiters that receive bonuses, usually titled "enrollment coordinators"), the poor quality of the staff, the expense of the programs, the non-accreditation of some of the programs, the job prospects that don't materialize, etc.
I am wondering if any of you went through any of these health-related or nursing programs and what you thought about them. I know the University of Phoenix is big for online RN-BSN. They also mentioned Chamberlain College of Nursing in the article. There weren't any nursing graduates featured in the article but they did interview a few sonography grads and medical assistant grads that were poorly prepared, non-licenseable, and unable to find clinical experiences or jobs. I have always been very skeptical of online nursing programs that seem wayyyyyy to convenient -- how can you actually get a decent, online, accelerated education with no clinical, preceptorship, or intern experience whatsoever from what are probably (so the article says) very underqualified instructors (one school actually had an instructor that falsified a nursing license to teach there)?
I am particularly concerned because my nurse manager (and, I have discovered, several other NMs in my facility) have received their MBA-HCMs (Health Care Management) at University of Phoenix. Now that I have seen an article like this, I am wondering if their degree is worth a hill of beans. I DO know that my boss worked full time, finished her MBA in two years, and was never out of the job market to intern or be precepted educationally (don't most MBA grads have to do something like that, or am I wrong?) That pace just doesn't seem like it should be an attainable goal for a reasonably academically adequate education program. I think to go to a real school, you would probably have to take night/weekend classes 3-4 days a week year-round to get done with an MBA that fast. It just seems like a joke. Do they really know anything more than I do now that they have the letters after their name?
I am interested in clinical leadership (not management.) I am working on an MSN at a respectable (not particularly prestigious) public university. I would never dream of going to a school where I couldn't meet and interact with an expert instructor.
