EducationDynamics (“EDDY”) is a multichannel higher education marketer and lead generation company that services a number of for-profit and formerly for-profit online colleges, including American Intercontinental University, Colorado Technical Institute, South University, Purdue University Global (formerly Kaplan University), and University of Arizona Global (formerly Ashford University). [i]
EDDY’s operations include call centers in Boca Raton, Florida and Lenexa, Kansas where some education advisors are paid commissions for enrolling students. It appears that the call centers have been engaged in bait-and-switch tactics as consumers who are seeking work are enrolled in these schools.
Originally known as Halyard Education, EducationDynamics has faced allegations of being a predatory company for at least a decade. [ii][iii] For more than a decade, the company, through a number of lead generation websites and tv commercials, brought hundreds of thousands of leads to the most predatory schools, including Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute, and Virginia College, all which have closed. In 2019 and 2020, EDDY purchased the assets of other dubious marketers, Thruline[iv] and Quinstreet. [v][vi]
At least one source has indicated that Halyard and EducationDynamics purchased leads from Alec Defrawi, who was prosecuted by the FTC in 2016 for a job-education bait-and-switch scheme.[vii] While the recipients of the leads were not mentioned in the complaint, a comment on the FTC website also alluded to a relationship between Defrawi and EducationDynamics.[viii]
More recently, there is evidence on GlassDoor[ix] and Indeed[x] suggesting that EDDY has engaged in bait and switch tactics at its Boca Raton call center. Former employees have complained that the call center receives leads from people who believed they were applying for work, and that call center workers were required to enroll them in schools.
While the allegations were not as clear at the Kansas location, one EducationDynamics sales associates stated that they were getting “shady” and “uninterested” leads and that management was aware of the problem. The employee also noted that EDDY workers went under different company names to avoid scrutiny.
State Universities are using Google Ads to boost enrollment numbers.
(Updated November 28, 2022)
While for-profit colleges, community colleges, and small private schools received the most attention in the first iteration of the College Meltdown, regional public universities (and a few flagship schools) have also experienced financial challenges, reorganizations, and mergers, enrollment losses, layoffs and resignations, off-campus learning site closings and campus dorm closings, lower graduation rates, and the necessity to lower admissions standards. They are not facing these downturns, though, without a fight.
State universities, for example, are attempting to maintain or boost their enrollment through marketing and advertising--sometimes with the assistance of helpful, yet sometimes questionable online program managers (OPMs) like 2U and Academic Partnerships and lead generators such as EducationDynamics.
Academic Partnerships claims to serve 50 university clients. HEI has identified 25 of them.
Google ads also follow consumers across the Web, with links to enrollment pages. And enrollment pages include cookies to learn about those who click onto the enrollment pages. Schools share the information that consumers provide with Google Analytics and Chartbeat.
A pop-up Google Ad for Penn State World Campus
Advanced marketing will not improve institutional quality directly but it may raise awareness of these state schools to targeted audiences. Whether this becomes predatory may be an issue worth examining.
In order to stay competitive, state universities have to have a strong online presence and spend an inordinate amount of money on marketing and advertising. Ohio University and other schools now offer programs that are 100 percent online.
State universities have joined for-profit colleges in the television advertising space.
Despite marketing and enrollment appeals like this, we believe the financial situation could worsen at non-flagship state universities when austerity is reemployed--something likely to happen during the next economic downturn.
Aaron Klein at the Brookings Institution calls this significant (and dysfunctional) out-of-state enrollment pattern as The Great Student Swap.
State Universities with more than 4000 foreign students include UC San Diego, University of Illinois, UC Irvine, University of Washington, Arizona State University, Purdue University, Ohio State University, Michigan State University, and UC Berkeley.
People fortunate enough to attend large state universities as undergrads may feel alienated by large and impersonal classrooms led by graduate assistants and other adjuncts. There are also significant and often under-addressed social problems related to larger universities, including hunger, substance abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, hazing and sexual assault.
EducationDynamics is a lead generator for "robocolleges" such as Purdue University Global and University of Arizona, Global Campus.
Purdue University Global has used questionable marketing and advertising.
The Higher Education Inquirer has already noticed the following schools in the Summer and Fall 2022 that received media scrutiny for lower enrollment, financial problems, or labor issues:
In a previous Higher Education Inquirer article, I presented frightening full-time faculty numbers at some large online universities which I call "robocolleges." Full-time faculty at these robocolleges, in fact, are nearly nonexistent. Bear in mind that all of them are regionally accredited, the highest level of institutional accreditation, and the list includes well-known public university systems as well as for-profit ones.
Robocolleges have de-skilled instruction by paying teams of workers, some qualified and some not, to write content, while computer programs perform instructional and management tasks. Learning management systems with automated instruction programs are known by different names and their mechanisms are proprietary. As professor jobs are deskilled, tasks can be farmed out at reduced costs.
Besides the human content creators who may be given instructional titles, other staff members at robocolleges are paid to communicate with students regarding their progress. The assumption is that managing work this way significantly reduces costs, and it does, at least in the short and medium terms. However, instructional costs are frequently replaced by marketing and advertising expenses to pitch the schools to prospective students and their families. Companies like EducationDynamicsand Guild Educationhave filled the niche of promoting robocolleges to workers at a reduced cost but their overall impact is minimal.
Meanwhile, companies like Cheggprofit from this form of learning, helping students game the system in greater numbers, in essence creating robostudents.
The business model in higher education for reducing labor power and faculty costs is not reserved to for-profit colleges. Community colleges also rely on a small number of full-time faculty and armies of low-wage contingent labor.
In some cases, colleges and universities, including many brand name schools, utilize outside companies, online program managers (OPMs), to run their online programs, with OPMs like 2U taking up as much as 60 percent of the revenues. OPMs can perform a variety of jobs, but are best known for their work in enrollment and retention. Prospective students may believe they are talking to representatives of a particular university when in fact they are talking to someone from an outside source. Noodle has disrupted the OPM model by selling their services ala carte, but only time will tell whether it has an impact, or whether schools will merely find less costly outsourced servicers.
Outsourcing higher education has been a reality in US higher education for decades. And automation is also part of education, as it should, when it performs menial tasks, such as taking roll and doing preliminary work to determine student cheating. It's likely that more schools will become more robotic in nature to reduce organizational expenses. But what are the long-term consequences with long-term student outcomes, when automation is used to perform higher level tasks, and when outsourced individuals act in the name of brand name colleges?
To get a small glimpse of this robocollege phenomenon, these schools cumulatively have about 3000 full-time instructors for more than a half-million students.
American Intercontinental University: 51 full-time instructors for about 8,700 students.
American Public University System has 345 F/T instructors for more than 50,000 students.
Aspen University has 34 F/T instructors for about 9,500 students.
Capella University: 216 F/T for about 38,000 students.
Colorado State University Global: 34 F/T instructors for 12,000 students.
Colorado Technical University: 59 F/T instructors for 26,000 students. Devry University online: 53 F/T instructors for about 17,000 students.
Grand Canyon University has 461 F/T instructors for 103,000 students.* Liberty University: 1072 F/T for more than 85,000 students.* Purdue University Global: 346 F/T instructors for 38,000 students.
South University: 0 F/T instructors for more than 6000 students.
Southern New Hampshire University: 164 F/T for 104,000 students.
University of Arizona Global Campus: 194 F/T instructors for about 35,000 students. University of Maryland Global: 193 F/T instructors for 60,000 students.
Before that, Kaplan Higher Education and Kaplan Higher Education gained attention for selling off their for-profit schools but maintaining the management services for Purdue University Global and University of Arizona Global.
In this media attention on OPMs, a few companies have been able to avoid much scrutiny, with Academic Partnerships flying below the national media radar for years.
Academic Partnerships (AP) is a mature online program manager that claims to serve more than 50 universities, most regional state universities. The Higher Education Inquirer could only find about half that number. AP also claims to "help universities grow"--without providing much evidence. In some cases, these lesser brand schools have been facing decreasing enrollment and revenues-- and it's not apparent how much AP can help them in the long run.
What we do know is that the OPM receives about half of all the revenues for their work, which includes cheaper privatized marketing, advertising--and recruitment services from enrollment specialists spread across the US.
AP's sales pitch is that they can transform their partner universities and help provide reasonably priced degrees in lucrative career fields (such as RN to BSN programs), but is this happening with all the online degree programs offered? And would some consumers be better off choosing a local community college?
AP's partner universities include: Arkansas State University Avila University Boise State University Carleton University Eastern Michigan University Eastern Washington University Emporia State University Florida International University Louisiana State University Shreveport Norfolk State University Northern Kentucky University
Pittsburg State University Radford University St. Cloud State University Southern Illinois University Southern Oregon University Southeastern Oklahoma State University Texas A&M (International University) University of Illinois Springfield University of Maine at Presque Isle University of North Carolina Pembroke University of Texas at Arlington University of West Florida William Paterson University Youngstown State University
If you teach or study online at one of these AP university partners, what have you observed?
Do instructors maintain the rights to the content they have created?
What are the online classes like compared to face-to-face courses?
What are graduation rates for these online students compared to on campus students?
How much debt do former online students have compared to on campus students?
What kind of jobs are former online students getting compared to on campus students?
Are former online students able to pay off these debts?
2025 promises to be a disruptive year in higher education and society, not just in DC but across the US. While some now can see two demographic downturns, worsening climate conditions, and a Department of Education in transition, there are other less predictable and lesser-known trends and developments that we hope to cover at the Higher Education Inquirer.
The Trump Economy
Folks are expecting a booming economy in 2025. Crypto and AI mania, along with tax cuts and deregulation, mean that corporate profits should be enormous. The Roaring 2020s will be historic for the US, just as the 1920s were, with little time and thought spent on long-range issues such as climate change and environmental destruction, economic inequality, or the potential for an economic crash.
A Pyramid, Two Cliffs, a Wall and a Door
HEI has been reporting about enrollment declines since 2016. Smaller numbers of younger people and large numbers of elderly Baby Boomers and their health and disability concerns spell troubleahead for states who may not consider higher education a priority. We'll have to see how Republican promises for mass deportations turn out, but just the threats to do so could be chaotic. There will also be controversies over the Trump/Musk plan to increase the number of H1B visas.
Student loan debt is expected to rise again in 2025. After a brief respite from 2020 to late 2024,and some receiving debt forgiveness, untold millions of borrowers will be expected to make payments that they may not be able to afford. How this problem affects an otherwise booming economy has not been receiving much media attention.
Protests may be limited out of fear of persecution, even if there are a number of legitimate issues to protest, to include human induced climate change, genocide in Palestine, mass deportations, and the resurgence of white supremacy. Things could change if conditions are so extreme that a critical mass is willing to sacrifice. Other issues, such as the growing class war, could bubble up. But mass surveillance and stricter campus policies have been emplaced at elite and name brand schools to reduce the odds of conflict and disruption.
The Legitimization of Robocollege Credentials
Online higher education has become mainstream despite questions of its efficacy. Billions of dollars will be spent on ads for robocolleges. Religious robocolleges like Liberty University and Grand Canyon University should continue to grow and more traditional religious schools continue to shrink. University of Southern Hampshire, Purdue Global and Arizona Global will continue to enroll folks with limited federal oversight. Adult students at this point are still willing to take on debt, especially if it leads to job promotions where an advanced credential is needed.
AI will continue to affect society, promising to add more jobs and threatening to take others. One less visible way AI affects society is in academic cheating. As long as there have been grades and competition, students have cheated. But now it's become an industry. Even the concept of academic dishonesty has changed over the years. One could argue that cheating has been normalized, as Derek Newton of the Cheat Sheet has chronicled. Academic research can also be mass produced with AI.
The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) continues to grow without financial support and without paying for advertising or SEO help. The reason is that HEI continues to provide useful information for folks who follow US higher education. We do it in the spirit of Upton Sinclair and others pejoratively known as the muckrakers. And we gladly take the label.
For years, the higher ed herd dismissed warnings of looming financial crises, but HEI accurately foresaw the revenue declines and unsustainable models forcing college closures, and the downside of the online pivot (including online program managers and robocolleges). We also saw a decade of enrollment declines with no end in sight.
HEI has published a number of articles that provide value to higher ed
workers (including adjuncts), future, present, and former students
(including the tens of millions of student loan debtors), and other folks affiliated with the
higher ed industry (including workers at edtech and financial companies). We called it the College Meltdown.
While honest reporting is important to us,
we do take sides, just as other outlets do (most others take the side of
big business and government). We are for the People, and we hunt for corruption that undermines
democracy. We have examined companies (like Guild, Maximus, and EducationDynamics) that few
others will bother to examine. We continue to follow subprime
for-profit colleges that have morphed into subprime state universities
(like Purdue Global and University of Arizona Global) and other bad actors in higher ed (like 2U and the University of Phoenix).
We value history, the real unvarnished history,
not the tales, myths and lies that have been repeated to children for
generations and used as indoctrination at all levels of society. And we value those who look honestly at the present and the future, those not trying to sell themselves or their hidden agendas.
