Have you heard good - or bad - things about an online college? Share which online universities you feel are the best in a reputation review.
"Anybody who's thinking of enrolling in an online degree ... take a good look at GetEducated.com . Go ... get a free download of a detailed guide ."
Searching for an Online MBA?: "Several websites can help .. first, GetEducated.com offers free rankings of distance-learning MBA programs."
"Beware diploma mills... Go to GetEducated.com and ask the Diploma Mill Police."
"For a distance MBA you can pay from $6,000 to $120,000. To get the most bang for your buck ... check out GetEducated.com"
GetEducated.com – "a great source for weeding out phonies" (among online colleges).
"Thanks much for your wonderful site! I've recommended it to my students and entered a program I found at GetEducated.com." --Charles Balch, MBA, Ph.D. --Professor, Arizona Western College
Vicky Phillips -- Founder of GetEducated.com ... "for 20 years the leading consumer advocate for online college students" ... Different Paths to a College Degree, Sept. 2009
Vicky Phillips ... founder of GetEducated.com ... "one of the nation’s leading experts on educational fraud" ... . ~Joyce Lain Kennedy~ (Nov, 2009), LA Times
"Kiplinger Personal Finance" partners with Get Educated - Top 15 Picks Prestigious Online Masters Degrees
Get Educated helps LATimes Consumer Reporter David Lazarus in "Getting an Education Learning Over the Internet" -- Nov. 10, 2010
Get Educated's beloved mascot, Chester Ludlow, dog with online MBA, helps Neely Tucker, Washington Post reporter, expose murderous minister with degree mill pedigree - Dec. 2010
My name is Vicky Phillips, and I am the founder of GetEducated.com, a consumerwatchdog group that has reported on online education for 21 years. We were very disappointed to read a WalletPop blog post this morning that contains multiple false accusations and factual errors about online education in general and GetEducated.com in particular.
In the interest of accuracy, which is notably lacking in Beau Brendler’s blog, we are taking the time to correct these factual errors for the public.
The Facts:
• GetEducated.com publishes consumer information that is editorially independent from ad influence.
• GetEducated.com offers free basic listings to all accredited online colleges; our directory is not, like at other sites, a lead generation mill that lists only paid clients.
• The majority of colleges listed in our directory have never had an ad relationship with our company.
• GetEducated.com accepts no ads or listings from unaccredited colleges or schools (a much higher ad standard than used by WalletPop or its parent company AOL/Time Warner).
More Facts:
GetEducated.com’s online university rankings are not paid advertising showcases, as erroneously stated by Beau Brendler, the blogger. GetEducated.com’s Best Buy (affordability) rankings are based on objective, verifiable factual data.
The rankings allow consumers who are concerned about cost to see, in a snapshot, who offers the most affordable—and least affordable—online education degrees among all competing accredited providers.
These rankings are not dominated by, nor are they controlled by, for large profit-colleges, such as Capella University, as falsely imagined by Mr. Brendler.
The blog also contends, falsely, that our Best Buy ranking lists are designed solely to showcase and promote selected “for profit” colleges, which Mr. Brendler further falsely imagines to be the main source of GetEducated.com’s revenue.
Mr. Brendler writes that “most of the content on (our) home page is advertising.” This is not true. Fact: the only advertising that appears above the fold on GetEducated.com’s home page are two sponsor banners. And both have been clearly marked as sponsors since the site's inception.
The "Best Buy” section Mr. Brendler refers to is not an advertising showcase. This section contains objective, factual editorial rankings. The “reviews” section is also not an ad showcase. It contains user-generated editorial drawn at random from our college directory database. GetEducated runs an extremely low percentage of home page ads above the fold, and all ads are marked accordingly.
Here are the facts:
The main source of GetEducated’s income —80 percent—comes from media placed by traditional non-profit colleges. Not from for-profits.
GetEducated.com’s Best Buy rankings are based on factual, verifiable data on tuition and fees. These rankings are editorially independent. Never “bought.” No schools pay to be included in or removed from these rankings or reviews. Supporting Data:
WalletPop further incorrectly states that GetEducated is publishing ranking lists based on single anonymous reviews. This is not true. We have not yet published ranking tables of the Best Online Colleges in Student Satisfaction or Public Perception because these rankings must be created by compiling user-generated content. Until we reach a critical mass of verifiable reviews—which we are collecting now—we will not be able to publish these reviews as valid and reliable ranking lists.
WP falsely discredits our Rankings of the Best Buys in Masters in Education. This factual list is based on a Fall 2009 national survey of 313 education degrees from 101 regionally accredited colleges. This Best Buy list profiles 72 “affordable” options that statistically cost less than the national average among all similar competing degrees in the same accreditation class.
Fact: The majority of the top ranked most affordable education schools we profile do not have an advertising relationship with GetEducated.com, beginning with the number one ranked school, Appalachian State.
Fact: Of the top 10 Ranked Best Buys only one, East Carolina University, has a banner ad account on GetEducated’s site. And that ad account was not in existence at the time the ed survey list was created. Nor is that ad account specific to the School of Education at ECU. It is an account with the Grad Business School instead.
Of the 72 degrees on the Education Best Buy ranking list, only 23.6 percent have run any type of advertising plan with GetEducated.com in the last year. No school can “buy” a spot on our rankings list.
As I explained to Mr. Brendler when he called to insist that our ranking lists are paid showcases for for-profit advertisers: if our goal is to promote our advertisers in particular or for-profit colleges in general, we are doing an abysmal job of it. The vast majority of schools on our Best Buy lists are non-profits.
Fact: GetEducated.com promotes more schools who don’t advertise with us on our Best Buy ranking lists than those that do. If there is a relationship between advertising with GetEducated.com and getting listed on any Best Buy lists it is a verifiable inverse relationship.
Mr Brendler falsely states that GetEducated.com promotes Walden University’s online MBA as a best buy. This is not true. In fact, we list Walden’s MBA as among the least affordable online MBAs in its accreditation class. Yes, Walden University advertises on our site. It also received a "D" for affordability because that program costs a fair amount more than its regionally accredited competitors.
Advertising and editorial are separate at GetEducated.com. A school can open an ad account on GetEducated.com and get rated a D or F for affordability or along any other ranking dimension. Many do.
Mr. Brendler falsely states that GetEducated.com promotes regionally accredited online MBAS over AACSB accredited MBAS because we are paid to do so. Fact: we publish balanced consumer information that outlines the pros and cons of choosing an AACSB MBA program vs. a regionally accredited one.
Advertising does not influence our editorial rankings or consumer advice; if it did you would see us promoting AACSB MBAs over regionally accredited ones because percentage-wise the majority of our MBA ad clients are AACSB accredited.
For any ranking system to be “real” it must meet three criteria. 1) It must be valid – that is to say it must measure what it purports to measure – such as cost; 2) it must be reliable – that is to say that others who attempt the same ranking should get similar results or that the results can be independently verified by others who look at the same data set; and 3) it must be objective – that is, it must measure what it says and include a valid data set. Our Best Buy rankings meet all three criteria. No affordability ranking list we publish is affected by advertising.
Brendler’s main compliant about GetEducated.com is the peculiar contention that we cannot be a for-profit site and also be a consumer watchdog agency. We reject this belief. We would expect Mr. Brendler to logically do likewise given that he tags himself a “consumer watchdog” yet draws his paycheck from a for-profit AOL/Time Warner ad-driven blog.
Every great consumer publication is ad-driven. Kiplinger’s. Money. CNN. Motley Fool. Bankrate.com. Morningstar. Are we not to trust their data then? No, what we trust is that they are able to separate ads from editorial. GetEducated.com has for 21 years followed this same guiding principle.
WalletPop itself runs ads from online colleges. So too does its parent company, AOL/Time Warner— which, for the record, operates an online education lead-generation business that competes with GetEducated.com.
In the interest of transparency we believe Mr. Brendler, who claims to advocate for consumers, should have disclosed his parent corporation’s conflict of commercial interest in regards to this story.
The public desperately needs more quality, factual information about the online college sector, which is rife with scams and misinformation. Online education scams represent a billion-dollar-a-year industry. And the U.S. is ground zero for online college degree mills. GetEducated.com is disappointed that WalletPop did not capitalize on this opportunity to help the public glean factual information through solid reporting.
We thank WalletPop for attempting to cover the online college sector. We stand ready to provide factual editorial data should it wish to publish more credible coverage on the topic of online education in the future.
God knows we could all use more of that.
What’s your opinion of WalletPop’s piece?
We encourage you to Log on to WalletPop or our Facebook Page and register your opinion about—and experiences with—the helpfulness and trustworthiness of GetEducated.com’s resources.
Vicky Phillips, Founder GetEducated.com Get Educated, Inc.
