Kaplan University

I know a few folks who went through Kaplan and succeded with satisfactory success. I would recommend Kaplan to anyone looking for a great school either online or locally.

My advice? Go to community college, and then transfer to a public university when you complete your AA degree if you're so inclined. The educational quality is better and your debt load would be significantly less, perhaps even zero. Kaplan, University of Phoenix and many of these other schools are of dubious quality, with high pressure recruitment techniques that play loose with the truth, especially when it comes to post-education employment prospects.

Schools like Kaplan focus their marketing efforts on recruiting economically disadvantaged and ill-prepared students. Many of these students wouldn't graduate college because they are simply not ready for the work, yet these schools admit them readily. They are saddled with huge debt from student loans. And the ones who do graduate may be in even worse shape, owing several times as much in student loans and having degrees that are worthless in the real world.

I have a friend who was an adjunct at one of these schools who told me that he was pressured to pass all students who were current on their student loans. At any other school, if you're not doing the work, you fail, but not at these places. The result is a flood of unqualified graduates spilling into the job market with artificially inflated grades and worthless diplomas.

Furthermore, these schools have taken up a larger and larger share of the federal student loan and grant pool over the past few years. The for-profit education sector gets almost 85 percent of their revenue from publicly subsidized grants and loans, which are then sold in the secondary markets by Kaplan and other schools. These players are feeding at the public trough, while condemning their students to long term debts.

Unlike public community colleges which also serve the "non-traditional" student, the cost per credit at for-profits is exorbitantly high, making the debt load on their students and graduate unbearable, to the point where they will spend a lifetime paying off their loans. Compounding matters is the fact that federally guaranteed loans generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Thus these people will be saddled with these loan obligations forever, while the proceeds of those loans have been long gone into the coffers of the corporate shareholders.

Buyer beware...There are better, more affordable options for an education.

Attended KU for Information Technologies Bachelor of Science completed 2009. The curriculum is challenging, professors are professional, the experience and feedback from classmates and professors is brilliant. The only downside is getting a chance to speak to a live representative without the many phone prompts.

I recommend Kaplan University or any online school only if you are a dedicated individual with the self-dicipline to get things done ontime without the hand holding. Online and distance learning is not for everyone - it is for me though. Commute time is not required. This should not be the only reason to choose distance learning over traditional coursework since distance learning demands better time management than traditional courses. You get out of an education exactly what you put into it.