<p>I agree with posters pointing out that fit for each student is what is most important. I actually think HPU would be a great place to go to college if the academic program was a good one. As I also said, the academics may indeed be great but their marketing does not emphasize that aspect.</p>
<p>I think it’s totally unfair to compare HPU with a school like Oberlin. Compare it to NEmom’s suggested cohorts - Roanoke, Queens, Guilford, Lycoming. All LAC’s are not the same. I think HPU’s business department looked very good.</p>
<p>What “looked very good” about High Point’s business department?</p>
<p>It could not have been because it’s AACSB accredited, because it’s not.
There are 593 accredited business programs and High Point’s is not one of them.</p>
<p>(FYI, Penn State, the school which Yankeesgirl turned down to go to High Point, does have an accredited program).</p>
<p>Since my son is not interested in the Business program, I’ve got to admit that my research into that at any college is just cursory but our tour guide at HPU was a business major (I think he said he was in an Entrepreneur program) and he mentioned two things that sounded good. One was how students in their senior year needed to come up with a business plan and present it to a group of people and ask them to invest in it. If chosen then the students get real money to start a business. He also said that each business student gets one on one time with the President whom everyone talked about as a very astute business person. Here are their stated goals: [url=<a href=“http://business.highpoint.edu/-mission]Mission[/url”>http://business.highpoint.edu/-mission]Mission[/url</a>]</p>
<p>WOW!! I can’t believe that High Point’s Business program is not accredited by the AACSB. We toured High Point with my son this past summer. He was falling for all the fluff - the personalized sign when we parked, the golf cart, the facilities. The academic buildings we toured had marble floors, the finest furniture the High Point offers and exquisite paintings. What any of this has to do with teaching is beyond me! I have heard on other threads relating to this school that the President often speaks about the “look” of students who attend - that he wants beautiful students to attend. In my opinion, High Point does nothing to prepare students for the real world. When I tour a college, I am not interested in how beautiful a campus is. I’m concerned with the faculty, course offerings and job placement once the student graduates. High Point is preparing it’s students for a major letdown when they do graduate and realize that in real life there are no marble floors, steak houses, free ice cream or conceirge service at their beck and call. As far as the school being on an “up and coming list”, my son is attending another school on that list - one that is accredited by the AACSB and has normal looking dorms, facilities and parking spaces.</p>
<p>So far we’ve looked at the chemistry, history and business programs.
Chem and history are under-resourced and business isn’t accredited.</p>
<p>I’m still standing by my original point. It was a big mistake to turn down Penn State for this school. If Yankeesgirl wanted a small LAC, fine. But given that she got into Penn State, she could have done way better than this school.</p>
<p>Ok, I was going to stay out of it, but I have to say this: I am from NC and HPU is all pretty but no substance. Ma’am, you are right in your gut feeling!</p>
<p>Check the faculty guide. High Point has zero faculty on staff for these languages.
Either these courses are taught by part-time adjunct instructors, or they are not really filling/offering these.</p>
<p>Also… this is a terrible metric for determining how hard their students work. I have a better one: how many graduates do they send to medical school?</p>
<p>Yes, for anyone interested in business, best NOT to go to HPU—not being AACSB accredited is a definate problem. Many employers will not recruit there, and it does not look good for grad school applications if you want to go onto an MBA.</p>
<p>I would be interested to know as well what type of companies actually do recruit there, and their job placement/grad school acceptance rate–for all majors, not just business majors.</p>
<p>One can go to grad school for an MBA if not graduating from an AACSB accredited school, however, if student A has a GPA of 3.6 attending a non-AACSB accredited school and student B has the same GPA, but student B graduated from an AACSB accredited program, student B will have a better chance of acceptance. Many business schools do not hold this accreditation and others have ACBSP accreditation, which is also not the same thing. AACSB accreditation I have been told by a business professor is more difficult and more expensive for a college/university to achieve.</p>
<p>“this is a terrible metric for determining how hard their students work.”</p>
<p>That’s why I don’t use it for that. The metric I mentioned is, do they have SOME students that want to work hard? Obviously, a university like HPU will have some students who want to coast – maybe most of them. But will a motivated student be able to find like-minded classmates?</p>
<p>The Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic courses are on the fall semester’s course schedule with rooms and so on. I suppose it’s possible that no one will be interested and that they will be cancelled, but they have been assigned instructors and space. </p>
<p>I don’t believe that adjuncts teaching introductory language courses makes them any less rigorous. It is quite common at top universities such as Northwestern and Harvard that expect native speakers to teach these courses. Those languages are extremely difficult and require focus and motivation from the students no matter what the title of the instructor may be.</p>
<p>I don’t have any axe to grind one way or another with HPU. But if I were to enroll there (or at a CC), and I was looking to take a class with the most academically focused kids in the school, this is where I’d go to find them.</p>
<p>I don’t have a horse in this race. I have no connection to High Point or Penn State.</p>
<p>I came across this thread almost at random and happened to see yankeesgirl’s post. It actually kind of upset me to think about her parents spending $$ to send her to “college” when she passed up Penn State so she could have warm weather, luxury dorms and a steakhouse.</p>
<p>I really don’t like when people fall victim to cleaver marketing, be it buying pet rocks, watching Oprah or enrolling at a school like High Point. It seems to me that that there’s a great marketing job being done here, but that’s all.</p>
That’s not quite what she said. She said that she couldn’t wait to experience those things, not that they were the determining factors in her decision.</p>
<p>Your opinion of Penn State is certainly your own, but the fact of the matter is that it is a wonderful school that is emphatically wrong for many people. My D looked there and ultimately decided not to apply because it wasn’t right for her. The poster here has her own priorities, values and aspirations, and it’s a little much for you to be “upset” about what her parents chose to do, and you’re relentlessness on the thread is remarkable.</p>
<p>Really?
There are nearly 600 AACSB accredited programs, ranging from Harvard to Ouachita Baptist University to everything in-between. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a university to put the effort forward to getting accredited <em>before</em> building a steakhouse, laying marble floors and giving out free ice cream.</p>
<p>“I really don’t like when people fall victim to cleaver marketing”</p>
<p>I don’t think anybody “fell victim” here. It sounds like HPU is advertising amenities, and people who want them can enroll and get them. I would only think there was a “victim” if the promised amenities weren’t there.</p>
<p>People who pay a lot of money to visit Disney World aren’t victims of clever marketing, either. They are told exactly what to expect – a man-made fantasy land – and that’s what they get.</p>
<p>Most of us on CC think that rigor, prestige, and selectivity are important factors when choosing a college. Well, not everybody feels that way. So be it. If somebody wants to go to college in a country club, that’s fine with me. (I’m jealous of the hammocks, actually; the dorm next door to mine had a tire swing, but no hammocks.)</p>
<p>When somebody makes a statement that an unaccredited business program “seems very good” I guess I could have let it lie, or point out that the reality is somewhat different. Sorry if my “relentlesness” bothers you.</p>
<p>They problem is that I think some of these kids and parents think they will be getting something else, namely a high-quality education. If someone wants to kick back and relax for four years and their parents have no problem paying for it, then who am I to argue?</p>
<p>But… don’t think for one minute that the education you are going to get will be anything close to what you would get at Penn State, etc. You can talk ‘fit’ all you like, but at some point it’s all about that “fancy book 'larning.”</p>