Is this a scam? Laureate Online Education & University of Liverpool MSc programmes

Froggitt wrote: »

Top one percentile? Liverpool doesn't even make it into the top 25% in the UK

[FONT=&quot]My understanding is that all of the Russell Group institutions can legitimately claim a global top 1% HE ranking (including Liverpool), but of course various league tables have their own methodologies, criteria, statistical methods and metric weightings. The one you cite is limited to national focus, and arguably values research output / H-Index metrics substantially lower than tables that hold research quality output as a more relevant institutional quality metric. (That’s not to say one is better than the other; teenagers looking to pursue a foundational degree would obviously have more interest over the former than the latter).[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Nevertheless, to deride a well-established, bricks-and-mortar institution as a “diploma mill” is, as I stated previously, a bizarre charge, and probably due to ignorance over any academic prejudice I would suspect.[/FONT]

Froggitt wrote: »

Are any of those "facts" in dispute Spiny?

I don’t work for the institution so I can’t offer a qualified rebuttal to who is on who’s payroll or how many students are enrolled at any particular time. (The international mix / countries represented is in the public domain however. I’ll let you do your own research to pull that up).

Access to physical facilities on campus is a curious expectation for a distance learning programme specifically focused at international, mid-career working professionals. If you need access to laboratory equipment you’d be doing a residential or blended (Ivy League preference) course, and if access to such resources were required there’d be no distance learning option in any case. I've done both; each have their own merits and limitations.


The other points raised are either false or disingenuous, so I will not address them.

I have been enrolled in the online MPH program at Liverpool since May 2013.

I should preface this by saying that I'm an American, more specifically a Californian, and while I don't consider Liverpool a top-ranked university, I did attend a top-ranked university for my undergraduate degree. I graduated three semesters early with a 3.75 GPA from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.S. in Molecular Environmental Biology. (As an aside, Randy Schekman, one of the winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology was one of my professors (Fall 2009 MCB 130 Cell Biology). In case you are wondering, he is a superlatively nice guy, but couldn't teach to save his life; as one of my classmates in MCB 130 put it, he could make 2 + 2 = 4 difficult to understand).

While UC Berkeley also offers an online MPH, I chose Liverpool for two reasons: international faculty & student body, and cost. In U.S. dollars, the MPH at Liverpool will end up being cheaper than my B.S. at Berkeley, that is, it will be under $18,000 USD, compared to UC Berkeley's MPH which at last check was $42,000 USD.

I will concede that before I started the program I had reservations and was apprehensive that it may be a scam, and may not even be affiliated with the University of Liverpool. But after enrolling in the program, I can say with absolute certainty that I have a received a very rigorous education hitherto, and that I have learned more in the past 8 months than I did in the 2.5 years I spent at Berkeley (sad but true).

My academic writing has improved by leaps and bounds since I entered the program. I actually should be working on my IP for my management of health systems' class right now! But I wanted to take some time to post a rebuttal.

Some of my professors are based in the UK, others are internationally based, and it's true that I always have at least one student in each module whose grasp of English is questionable at best. However, the vast majority of the students are competent and capable, and many are as articulate as I consider myself to be, which again, is more than I can say for the time I spent at UC Berkeley. In each class or module, as they are called, I typically have fewer than 10 classmates, except for the first class when there were twelve of us. Either way, enrollment is capped at 20.

The grading system is very rigorous, although that may just be the UK system in general. In the US, if you meet all the requirements, you receive an A. In my online courses through Liverpool, if you meet all the requirements, you receive a C. To receive even a B, you have to go above and beyond those requirements, to receive an A you basically have to write something worthy of publication in a high impact journal like NEJM or BMJ Pardon the hyperbole, I'm just not used to getting B's on written assignments, and it's perturbing but it pushes me to be more thorough in the construction of my arguments.

Anyway, I routinely write upwards of 3500 words per week, although with the due date of my IP swiftly approaching (the 31st), that number is now closer to 4000 words.

Finally, the discussion forums with the students are far more useful than an in-class discussion; in the online forums, there is an expectation that you cite pretty much every other sentence with peer-reviewed literature. In an in-class discussion, you are expected to share your opinion, but you are not necessarily expected to support those opinions with outside research of published, peer-reviewed literature by beginning each of your sentences with, "According to Girotra et al. (2012)..." Even if you did, your classmates would not have the time in the context of an in-class discussion to read your outside readings such as the Girotra et al. (2012) paper and compose a cogent rebuttal, by pointing that Girotra et al. (2012) actually stated x, not y or z.

To that end, I do not think that Liverpool online is a diploma mill per se, at least not more so than any other brick and mortar university in the US, where the tuition fees are significantly higher, and student evaluation is sketchy at best.

As to other criticisms, I would say, don't knock it until you've tried it, or at least until you know someone who actually has. If you want more information from an actual student, feel free to private message me. By the way, there are no weekends in the program, it runs Thursday through Wednesday, so I better get back to work!

Regards,

Leona