Penn Foster has made some big changes over the past few
months, and apparently more are on the way.
According to this article, Penn Foster
College is increasing its
workforce by more than 20 percent, hiring 95 more people to work in student
services. Once again, a spokeswoman for
the distance learning giant indicated Penn Foster plans to acquire competing
schools and form partnerships with a college or university to offer bachelor
degrees.
I think this is a great move for Penn Foster
College. As a student, my only complaint about the
school has been the difficulty in having emails returned by student services,
and receiving grades on essays in a timely manner. Hopefully, the additional staff in this area will
help alleviate these problems.
One statistic in the article which did surprise me is the
size of Penn Foster College. It is the second-largest distance learning
provider. Only the University of Phoenix
is bigger. Penn Foster
College has 200,000
students enrolled at any given time. However, Penn
Foster College’s
marketing has not been overbearing, at least in my opinion, and I think this
has helped them avoid some of the negative feedback one often hears about University of Phoenix.
I am most excited about hearing about Penn Foster
College’s plans to expand
their offerings to bachelor degrees.
There are two ways they could go about this. They could acquire another distance
learning-only school, such as Ashworth
University, and offer
additional associate degrees as well as Ashworth’s bachelor and master degrees. They could also offer bachelor degrees in
cooperation with Mountain
State University,
which they already have a transfer agreement with.
Either way, these developments come as good news not only
for Penn Foster, but for its students as well.