Introduction
University of the people seems like an insanely good deal because it is tuition free but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually free or that it’s even the cheapest college out there U of the P was founded in 2009 by shy reschef and Israeli businessman who wants everybody all over the world to have a chance to be able to get a bachelor’s degree and currently the school has over 100 000 students and the question we’re going to Deep dive today is should you become one of them to do that we’re going to give U of the p a grade in four categories transfer friendliness cost degree choice and student experience we’re going to average those out turn it into a GPA and the goal for a really solid hackable college is to get a 3.0 out of four and by the way if you’re looking to go back to college sign up for a consultation with me and my team at the link in the description we will help you graduate college quickly and inexpensively so you can build a career you love we typically save our clients about forty five thousand dollars and two to three years worth of time in just a 45 minute session
Transfer friendliness
in transfer friendliness let’s start by looking at the positive University of the people will allow you to transfer up to 75 of your degree from outside sources that means you only really have to take 30 credits with the school itself and that’s pretty standard for the industry at this point in addition based on my personal research looking at what other people have said looking at what their website says I’m gonna guess that they’re pretty accepting of transfer credit they mention accepting credit from accredited institutions which means that because they’re not saying specifically Regional Lee accredited institutions they’ll probably accept credit from nationally accredited institutions too and if they’ll accept credit from those guys that means they’ll probably can’t promise anything but they’ll probably accept credit from most places but one of the most important transfer friendliest questions we need to ask is how well do they play with clap dsst Sophia straighterline.com and study.com the big five of college hackability and the answer is sadly that they don’t list these equivalents sees anywhere even a Harvard lists some of their transfer clap exam equivalencies but for some reason University of the people doesn’t and they’re not a an official partner with any of these programs which means that trying to hack their degree with those five programs I mentioned the five big hackability options is the college equivalent of trying to throw darts blindfolded now I do know that they will consider those credits but we don’t know where they’ll land so while in actuality it might be the case that their transfer friendliness is at an a level because they don’t list anything publicly that really hurts their score so because they hide that information from us College hackers and because they really sort of seem to be pushing people towards actually taking their courses which are eight weeks a piece that puts their transfer friendliness score at a B
Cost
cost is you of the people’s biggest selling point and that pun was definitely intended you literally pay zero dollars on a per credit basis or any per semester basis but that doesn’t mean that they’re free overall if you get a bachelor’s degree from University of the people you will end up paying for probably three things number one you’re paying sixty dollars to apply number two you have to pay a hundred and twenty dollars per course to pay for the assessment work that the instructor does of the homework you submit and number three this is a fee that actually most schools don’t have when you transfer credits to U of the P they look at it and if they accept a course they charge you 17 per course accepted so let’s say you transfer in 60 credits that’s going to be about three hundred and forty dollars so all told if you do University of the people you’re looking at spending somewhere between twenty five hundred and five thousand dollars which is mind-blowingly good there’s only one other school I can think of that can become this cheap apart from you know sometimes community colleges are just paid for by the government and so because of that not only does you of the people get an A but because they’re rethinking the game of college tuition we’re going to give them our first ever a plus
Degree choice
when we assess degree choices at a school we’re looking at two things variety and flexibility and this is a category where University of the people really suffers first off as far as variety goes University of the people only has three options for a bachelor’s degree of course these bachelor’s degree options do have options for specializations for a total of 11 different specializations but even still that is not a lot of choice these three degrees are some of the most popular ones out there right now and they coincide really really well with the five highest paying easiest to get jobs that I mentioned in this video but you’re probably still only going to serve about 80 percent of students and leave 20 percent of students saying where’s my major on top of that University of the people is missing what I call a Chipotle major I talked about it in this video and so if you’re transferring in like 60 or 90 credits it might not actually be a good fit for you second let’s talk about degree flexibility we’re looking at their bachelor’s in business here and their website claims that all three of their degrees have about 36 elective credits which is six higher than what I like to see so that’s awesome there is enough space here for some adequate level of transfer of credits that might not fit in another place but the problem we run into is that their major areas are all hovering around 60 credit hours which is kind of a lot you kind of want to aim for more around 45 credits in a really hackable degree in the major area and so you’re less likely to hack quite as much of the major area and that makes the general education section which is typically very hackable pretty small and if you choose one of their specializations that probably means that your free elective section is going to be even smaller so overall for degree choice and degree flexibility I would give University of the people a c
Student experience
and finally it’s time to talk about student experience is a university that is almost free any good let’s find out number one University of the people has a 100 acceptance rate so you’re definitely getting in but number two you’re probably not going to graduate they only have a 13.4 graduation rate which is even below most for profits I mean if you really want to graduate and you’re the kind of person who cares about this and you’re going to make it happen then you can be part of that 13.4 percent but most people aren’t number three they are a non-profit which is very much in their favor means they’re not necessarily out there to make money and they might actually have some of your best interests in mind number four the biggest vote against University of people is that they’re not regionally accredited and because they’re a U.S School based out of California and the US their highest level of accreditation is a regionally accredited degree that means that this degree is not going to be worth quite as much in the job market or is not going to be quite as reliable about getting you into graduate schools now in the rest of the world if you’re in a country or going into a profession where they’re just saying Hey I want a bachelor’s degree a bachelor’s degree this one will definitely get the job done but particularly for those of you in the US or those of you looking to go to a U.S graduate program you might want to look into regionally accredited programs because there are going to be a lot of positions and a lot of graduate programs that just won’t accept nationally accredited degrees and the reason for that is that it’s a lot easier to get national accreditation and much harder to get regional accreditation number five we have the student experience so their classes are based on an asynchronous model where all the course content is uploaded and you just go through it for eight weeks and every week you have some stuff to read some stuff to watch and you have some homework to do but what’s interesting about these guys is that your grades are actually mostly calculated by your peers so if you submit a written assignment you will get graded by three of your classmates and you will have to grade three of your classmates each week now if you think that your grades unfair you can go ahead and email your professor but I’ve I’ve heard some University people student students talk about this where they say that it can be really annoying because their classmates will give them an unfair grade or they their classmates won’t really think through it and they’ll have to go to their professor and say like hey can you look at this and having to do that several times a semester can be a little bit bothersome on the other hand it means that these classes basically run themselves for the most part with just a kind of a professor lurking in the shadows helping out where there’s help needed which is what helps make it so inexpensive it means that you’re interacting with your peers more and it means that this is a really great opportunity for you to reflect on what makes a good assignment so you’re actually learning by grading other people number six if you look at online reviews of University people on grad reports niche.com and edu opinions they have a 9.5 rating out of 10 by their students which is insanely High compared to the other schools that I’ve reviewed if people do complain they tend to complain about the 60 application fee which is insane to me do you guys literally know how much you’re saving on college right now that you’re going to complain about 60 ridiculous students tended to really just gush about the educational experience they really enjoyed it apparently and they really liked all that interaction with their peers they felt like they were learning from other students which was a really good experience for them and then some people did complain about customer service saying it was hard to reach people at the school are hard to get help with certain problems and to that point for my point number seven I wanted to research and find out exactly what the catch was here because if we’re paying so little there’s no way they’re you know providing really good customer service and it turns out that while students really like the classes it is super hard to get answers from the school before you’ve become a student so in researching for this video I emailed three different University of the people official university-wide email addresses it’s been 48 hours and I have heard nothing they don’t have a phone line you can call it just leaves a voicemail and you hope they’ll get back to you and if you go into their website and you try to contact somebody through the chat I have literally been waiting since 10 22 for them to have an agent chat me back and it is now 4 34. so it’s been over six hours and no one has chatted me back that extra help not having it is partially how they save on costs if I was basing my assessment on the student experience just on student reviews this would be a strong a but the 13.4 graduation rate the lack of a regional accreditation and my personal difficulty getting in contact with anybody and being able to talk to like a real person would normally torpedo agreed like this down to an F so we’re gonna split the difference and we’re gonna call it a c it’s a great student experience for those who like it but very few graduate and the degree itself is less useful in the US as a result
Conclusion
University of the People’s College hack GPA is a 2.9 out of 4.0 which is a little bit disappointing they’re incredibly inexpensive students love them if their website would tell us we would know that they probably do accept a lot of transfer credit but they are secretive about hacking equivalencies they seem to push students towards their eight week long courses they only have three degrees that are moderately flexible they have a 13.4 percent graduation rate and they’re only regionally accredited I could see this school being a really affordable excellent option for people outside of the US and and maybe even some people inside of the US but at the end of the day it wouldn’t really be my first choice after watching this video make sure you’re doing your own research make sure you’re planning backwards making sure that what you’re getting from University of the people lines up with what you need to have to be able to move on to your next career step and if that next step does include you of the people and you want some help putting together a degree plan or you want help putting a degree plan for any school out there go ahead and sign up for a consultation with my team at the link down in the description will help you graduate college quickly and inexpensively so you can build a career that you love I hope that this review has been helpful to you I hope you pick a great College that’s the perfect fit for you thanks for watching and happy hacking
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