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Former Students Accuse Kaplan of Misleading Them About Accreditation
Here is an online petition at www.change.org about Kaplan University's deceptive practices:
Please Help To End Kaplan University's Deceptive Practices
Greetings Washington Post Co. Board of Directors,
I'm writing you today to tell you that I stand with the group of former Kaplan University students who are urging Washington Post Chairman Donald Graham to shut down Kaplan University until he enacts meaningful changes to the way students' grievances are resolved.
More and more former Kaplan students are coming forward with horror stories about the bogus classes, surprise fees and deceptive policies they encountered as they struggled to achieve the American dream.
This massive nationwide controversy is a black mark on the name of the Washington Post. To date, the Washington Post's leadership has denied these stories and discounted their truth. As you've seen, this has only led to lawsuits, media stories and a more negative reputation for the Post, for Kaplan and the entire for-profit college industry.
To resolve the myriad complaints from students in the spirit in which they are made, Kaplan and the Washington Post must commit to creating an independent third-party office to moderate and resolve the many issues held by current students and former students.
As Directors of the Washington Post Company, you have the power to make this right. Please publicly commit to creating a third-party office to resolve student complaints.
By Eric Kelderman
Type the words "registered dietitian" into the Google search engine, and you're likely to see an advertisement at the top of the Web page directing you to Kaplan University's degree in nutrition science.
The problem: You can't become a registered dietitian just by earning that degree at Kaplan Inc., a for-profit institution owned by the Washington Post Company.
More troublesome, say some students who have enrolled in Kaplan's program, is that they don't find that out until they've spent or borrowed thousands of dollars to take courses. In fact, the online college is not accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Dietetics Education. Without that accreditation, students who earn the degree from Kaplan can't get a dietetic internship or take the commission's exam, which is required in many states to become a licensed dietitian.
The problem is being highlighted this week by the Change.org Web site, which promotes progressive social issues and is hosting an online petition asking Kaplan and its parent company to fix practices the petitioners believe to be unethical and misleading, or shut the university down.
The issue has also led the American Dietetic Association, the parent organization of the commission, to take the unusual step of warning students on its Web site that degrees from Kaplan and 11 other colleges are not approved by the commission.
The association posted the list about a year ago after a growing number of students who had taken courses at unaccredited institutions complained their colleges had told them they could take the certification exam, said Ulric K. Chung, the commission's executive director. While there have been complaints about other institutions, the list is composed of colleges whose names came up most frequently, Mr. Chung said. In addition, the association was concerned because a Google search of "registered dietitian" would return advertisements for unaccredited programs, such as Kaplan's, he said.
Others on the association's list of nonaccredited programs include American InterContinental University, Capella University, the University of Phoenix, and Walden University.
Officials from Kaplan said they could not comment on Wednesday but would provide a response later.
Nuanced Meaning of Accreditation
Casey Hetherington, 27, was one student who told Change.org she was misled. After finding the Kaplan program in a Web search, she said, she called the college and asked what she needed to become a registered dietitian in New York, where she lives.
Ms. Hetherington said she was originally told that Kaplan was "properly accredited." In fact, Kaplan is accredited as an institution by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools—one of the nation's six federally recognized regional accreditors—which qualifies its students to receive federal financial aid.
But about a year after she enrolled, she asked her adviser about doing an internship, and she said she was told that the program was not accredited so it couldn't place her in an internship.
"I didn't really know what the proper accreditations were," Ms. Hetherington said. "I thought they would tell me."
Ms. Hetherington told The Chronicle that she dropped out of the program at Kaplan but is still paying off an estimated $15,000 that she borrowed for the courses she took. She is now working as an office manager for a dental practice and is enrolled in an online dietetics program at Eastern Michigan University, which has the proper accreditation from the dietetics commission.
Officials at Eastern Michigan University say they are also very familiar with situations like Ms. Hetherington's.
"It's a huge problem," said Julie K. Uranis, program manager for EMU-Online.
"When Kaplan students have these issues, then they start digging into the accreditation issue. Then they find us," she said.
While Eastern Michigan doesn't have an agreement to accept Kaplan credits, it tries to accommodate them without jeopardizing its own accreditation, she said. For example, if a student earns a bachelor's degree in nutrition science from Kaplan, the university will provisionally accept the student in a related master's-degree program, usually requiring some extra classes, depending on the student's overall academic history.
"There's a reason they're not accredited" by the Commission on Accreditation for Dietetics Education, she said, "and we are."
— Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-03-17
http://chronicle.com/article/Former-Students-Accuse-Kaplan/126763/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
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