Business School, Continuing Education, and business educational options

Last summer I completed five years of teaching as an adjunct faculty member at a for-profit university that has some 47 satellite campuses throughout the southeast plus a large online division in northern Virginia.  My specialty was business administration, and in the final two years of my teaching I focused on courses for advanced undergraduates, particularly those nearing graduation.

It was a sobering experience.  I was teaching in an online environment, and the majority of my students had been taking online courses since they were freshmen.  I was considered a "demanding" professor, but to my thinking that type of instruction was precisely what the students needed before they left the university and tried to apply their business administration skills in the "real world."

I taught BUS490, which was called Business Policy, but which in reality was a course in strategic planning.  I was stunned to discover that most of my advanced undergraduates struggled to get through the course because they did not fully understand income statements, balance sheets, statements of cash flows, and descriptive statistics.  They should've learned these concepts in freshman business and accounting classes.

Eventually I understood that the students had not really learned much through their online classes.  They discovered early that they could pass courses simply by skimming through textbooks and answering multiple-choice questions.  The school required that all exams be "open book."  Thus, and not surprisingly, students collaborated with others at exam time.

Because of these problems, this school and other like it are not accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).  The "regional accreditation" of the school is meaningless.