hierophant wrote:I'm just speculating, but guess that there may be some pressure being exerted on the NCA/HLC by some of the universities in its region and perhaps by the administration in Washington, because APUS is both DL and for-profit. Both of those things aren't exactly popular among traditional academics and their unions.
Very likely. Another possible pressure point in the current climate is the inception of a new doctoral program, as many faculty members at traditional universities are concerned about the oversupply of PhD's. Too many universities operate PhD programs primarily in order to have inexpensive grad student labor to teach undergraduates. Of course, most APUS grads aren't likely to apply for the same academic jobs, nor are they giving up their lives for a number of years to be full-time doctoral students, but it's a hot-button issue that academics react to more often than they think about it. I hold a PhD, and I'm not bitter about either the process or the prospects, but many people in academia are, and are reacting as viscerally to this issue as to "for-profit" status. See the following links for some examples (some ranting about exploitation ahead if you do):
The Professor is In:
http://theprofessorisin.com/pearlsofwisdom/page/33/"The department quite literally could not run without the teaching labor of the graduate students. In one of my departments the entire first, second, and third year language programs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (some 30,000 credit hours annually) were handled entirely by graduate students."
Social Text:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_tex ... squet.html"it has to be acknowledged that increasingly the holders of the doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate employee labor system as its by-products, insofar as that that labor system exists primarily to recruit, train, supervise, and legitimate the employment of nondegreed rather than degreed teachers. This is not to say that the system doesn't produce and employ holders of the Ph.D., only that this operation has become secondary to its extraction of teaching labor from nondegreed persons, primarily graduate employees and former graduate employees now working as adjunct labor—as part-timers, full-time lecturers, postdocs, and so on."
Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/t ... msg1708307"without inexpensive grad student TAs, there's not enough people to staff the intro courses . . . Part of the story here is a model of graduate education that relied for 40 years on the overproduction of grad students and their cheap labor. It's breaking down, and I think we'll see, in many more places besides SUNY Albany, that it isn't a soft landing."