Today’s New York Times Magazine piece is definitely worth reading.
Link https://www.propublica.org/article/liberty-university-online-jerry-falwell-jr
Neither fair nor very accurate.
Can you be specific about the inaccuracies?
Using a few non-random selected unhappy students to portray the programs. Comparing default rate of LU online and campus students to those of typical residential schools. For mostly online (80% or so) LU is very good at 9%. Snark throughout.
To me it looks like pretty factual reporting. I don’t see snark.
I didn’t see snark either.
Here are the actual words of the article:
This appears to be factually accurate. College Navigator shows a 3-year “cohort default rate” of 9.9% for 2013 Liberty grads, which is apparently the number that the story used. Note that it takes 3 years to determine the 3-year default rate, so the number for 2013 grads became available in 2016. You could perhaps fault the story for not using the most recent 2014 rate (which became available in 2017), but for Liberty the 2014 rate is very similar at 9.7%.
The story evaluated Liberty relative to other “non-profit colleges”, not to “typical residential schools”. It’s true that Liberty has a higher percentage of distance students than most residential schools, and that this would be expected to increase the default rate. However, the story also evaluated Liberty – favorably – relative to for-profit schools, which do tend to have a high percentage of distance students.
Ideally, default rates would be reported separately for residential vs. distance students, but that level of detail is not available. The available data don’t make a distinction between residential and online degree programs – and neither does Liberty itself: