Adult Education: Are You Getting What You Pay For?

On the surface, it sounds like every student's dream: professors who aren't strict about class attendance, don't have any textbooks and think homework isn't necessary. Final exams, they're so passe.

But Sasha Greif didn't quite see it that way. Hoping to land a career in journalism, she plunked down $580 for a writing course through New York University's continuing-education program after seeing ads that promised taking a few classes might help her "gain the credentials to break into a new profession." Her goal was to trade a job stocking shelves in a bookstore for a shot at being the next Joan Didion.

But she says she arrived to find lengthy in-class reading sessions that took up valuable teaching time, no take-home writing assignments and no finals or tests. Most of the actual class time, she says, was spent reading stories or pitching ideas.

In response, the teacher, a working tabloid columnist, says he was trying to keep the class "practical" and used class time to help get the students' stories published. But it wasn't all work: His 25-year-old daughter subbed in for the last class, taking the group to an open-mike night at a local pub.

What does Greif, now working at an education-consulting firm, have to say about the experience? "I was really frustrated," she says.

Across the country, Americans are pursuing an ambitious new pastime: hitting the books. Whether to get a jump on a promotion, learn the latest cutting-edge technology or make a wholesale career change, members of the working world are dipping back into academia in record numbers.

Indeed, while workers have been taking extension classes for decades, this corner of continuing education has ballooned in the past few years. And we're not talking art history classes for retirees -- think practical subjects like finance and marketing.

In fact, many schools are creating specialized programs around these courses, everything from the University of Virginia's $2,900 certificate in public relations to the University of Texas's $4,500 program in "process management."

The appeal is pretty obvious. For students, it means getting a chance to revamp their lives, especially in an age when workers jump around so much and when technologies in some fields change so often. And that's how the programs are often marketed, with schools promising to help land dream jobs or sought-after promotions.

But the biggest beneficiaries may be the schools themselves, which are discovering that continuing-ed programs represent a small but fast-growing revenue source. Consulting firm Learning Resources Network estimates continuing-education programs will generate $8 billion in tuition by 2011, double that of 2003.

Even the Ivies are in on the boom: At Harvard, tuition from continuing-ed programs generated $170 million last year, up 10 percent from 2005 -- or double the growth rate of its graduate program.

But what are the students, who range from recent grads to boomers, getting for their money? Schools say the programs are receiving few complaints and that a $500 extension course on marketing isn't going to be of the same caliber as an accredited university course. But for the past four months, SmartMoney has been hitting the books, attending classes and talking to adult-ed students -- and getting a different report card.

Some students come away satisfied, describing classes with rigorous exams and hard-working teachers. But many are frustrated by a lack of standards for the courses or for training for the instructors.

Many classes, they say, have little oversight from department heads and lack the heft they expected, a problem particularly disappointing for anyone enrolled at a big-name university. (Robert Lapiner, the dean of NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies, says the program works hard to maintain standards and that Greif's instructor should have been more up front about the course's structure.)

And then there's the question of whether these courses carry any weight in the real world -- a topic still hotly debated by recruiting experts and human-resources officials.

For years adult-education classes existed as a side business at many universities, offering career-bolstering courses along with hobbyist classes like art history or landscape architecture. But these programs were typically small -- and they didn't make much money.

Gradually, many universities started making them more official, awarding certificates stamped with their seal and upping the tuition. But it wasn't until the tech boom of the late 1990s that universities started aggressively marketing their continuing-ed offerings as midcareer launching pads. The University of Virginia has added 200 classes in the past year alone, now including some 1,900 courses in everything from Western architecture to meeting planning.

And the response has surprised many of the schools: At the University of California-Irvine, more students are enrolled in continuing-ed courses than in the university's undergraduate and graduate programs combined.

Though individual courses still remain popular, many schools have created so-called certificate programs, groups of continuing-ed classes in a related field packaged together and sold almost like a mini-college degree. More than 800 schools now offer certificates, up from around 400 in 2000 -- and only about 40 a decade ago, according to Wayne Patterson, a professor at Howard University, who has studied the programs.

On paper, they're not all that different from bachelor of arts programs, with required courses, electives and sometimes concentrations. Sign up for UCLA's certificate in the Business and Management of Film, Television and Digital Entertainment Media, for example, and you'll need to take six required courses and three to four electives, including a recommended internship.

Schools say they've created such programs to meet a swelling demand among Americans, particularly boomers, to "test out" new careers. But it doesn't take a continuing-ed certificate in business to figure out the lucrative side to the certification industry: Would-be Jack Welches will pay $2,995 for a "mini-MBA" certificate from Rutgers, while UCLA's media-related certificate costs roughly $6,700 -- plus a $150 application fee.

With high tuition and less structure -- a college can cancel an adult-ed class if it doesn't draw enough students -- most schools earn a surplus of 5 to 10 percent on these classes. That's welcome revenue at universities that often rely on endowments to cover undergrad and graduate programs.

"This is a highly commercial area," says Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University.

The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire is a pleasant-looking, leafy campus nestled along the banks of the Chippewa River; undergrads and grad students attend classes here in tall brick buildings connected by walking paths.

Tonight a dozen or so working adults have gathered for the ninth session of Entrepreneurial Training, a 13-week, $1,000 extension class designed to teach budding entrepreneurs the basics of writing a business plan. Only this class isn't being conducted in one of the campus's stately lecture halls; instead, it's held across the river in an old storefront that's been turned into a suite of offices, next to a 24-hour Laundromat.

Enroll in other continuing-education courses here and at many universities, and you can wind up in the back of restaurants, churches or any number of ad hoc locations. Though they often market classes with pictures of the main campus, many schools say that because their degree-seeking students receive priority, they don't have the space for the growing ranks of continuing-ed students.

Class location, though, doesn't tend to get much mention in school ads for continuing ed, which some university officials say can be misleading.

"A lot of schools put the ivy-covered buildings on their brochures" to attract new students, says Doug Lynch, vice dean at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, which has its own extension program. "But once you enroll, that's not always where you end up."

More than the buildings, though, the lack of a serious workload or even a syllabus can bother some continuing-ed students.

Dave Strassman, a firefighter in the entrepreneurs course who hopes to get into the real estate business, says that instead of having a single instructor, the class is run by a series of guest lecturers -- some of whom impart less than expert knowledge of the field. One class on creative marketing techniques, he says, offered basic tips like mailing out fliers and advertising in the local paper.

"It was little more than common sense," Strassman says. "I just stopped listening."

It's a sentiment mirrored by some of his classmates. Fellow student Melissa Marlin, a 29-year-old salon manager, says a local consultant giving a presentation on customer service and time management simply read from an outline passed out to the class. That experience, she says, offered a lesson in time management in itself: "I could have read it in 15 minutes on my own."

The class's teacher, Jim Mishefske, a counselor for the local Small Business Development Center, says he's aware of the complaints and is considering changing the lineup of speakers this year. But he doesn't have to get approval for the experts he chooses, or even the course's syllabus -- it was approved once, eight years ago.

As for the lecturers, Mishefske says he chooses them for their known expertise in a field -- if they've written a book, for example -- and for their level of "excitement and energy." As for the marketing expert he brought in, Mishefske says that students tend to either "really like her or they really don't."

To be sure, a light workload and unhappy students are not the norm for all continuing-ed courses; indeed, many people have used them to launch new lives.

After working in television production for nearly a decade, Jen Zobel Bieber decided to switch gears two years ago and become a life coach, enrolling in NYU's Certificate in Personal and Life Coaching program. In eight months she took seven different courses, most of which, she says, were rigorous. Soon she and a classmate started their own coaching service -- and Bieber now estimates that they've coached more than 200 clients.

"I basically learned a discipline inside and out," she says. Similarly, Steve Crawford, a former project manager with AT&T, says his Rutgers certificates in "process improvement" helped him land a job at a consulting firm -- though the courses did cost him $5,000.

But for the most part, it's still far from clear how these credentials translate in the real world -- especially for students taking the courses in hopes of achieving a midcareer boost. Indeed, hiring managers and human-resources consultants say they're a mixed bag.

Timothy Holt, a recruiting manager for Verizon, says that certificate programs can sometimes benefit entry-level applicants, especially those seeking technical positions who have completed, say, a computer-related certificate. But he says applicants for mid- and senior-level positions will have only a "slight leg up" and that the bulk of the hiring decision depends on the interview and the actual work experience lining a candidate's resume.

Michael Beckmann, director of talent for mortgage financier Freddie Mac, says the courses and programs can confuse matters more than help, if only because there are no accepted standards for them. His company, he says, views such certificates "more like merit badges" when making hiring decisions.

But it's not just HR departments that aren't recognizing the courses; most continuing-ed classes can't be used toward a degree even at the universities that sponsor them. That's true, for example, for anyone trying to apply any of the 350 business courses at UCLA's extension school to its graduate business school. Similarly, at Princeton, continuing-ed students can earn credit for the courses that they can later apply to degree programs -- anywhere but at Princeton. (A spokesperson for UCLA says its graduate business school doesn't accept any extension courses; Princeton says its degree-seeking students get credit only for coursework completed after they're admitted.)

For their part, administrators say comparing continuing-education courses with degree-awarding programs is unfair, and point out that the curriculum standards are often different for a reason. Some programs hire instructors without academic credentials on purpose, for instance, emphasizing their career experience instead.

"Evaluations always favor instructors who are working, experienced in the field and know what they're talking about," as opposed to Ph.D. holders from academia, says Jean Martin, assistant director at the University of Texas at Austin's Professional Development Center.

Officials point out, too, that teachers who are currently in the workforce can often offer students a Rolodex of contacts in their industries -- a valuable benefit academic professors are unlikely to provide.

Even the elimination of homework, they say, is often deliberate, since so many continuing-ed students work full time. Indeed, for many programs, "the biggest selling point is that there aren't any tests," says Marilyn Kanne, continuing-education course coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Even so, some schools are starting to make changes. The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire recently launched a new revenue-sharing plan to entice professors to help create more-complex certificate programs.

At the University of Pennsylvania, professors spent a year consulting with industry experts before rolling out a new certificate program for heads of corporate education programs.

And some of NYU's recent offerings have stricter requirements: A certificate in foreign-language interpreting for health care professionals, for example, now requires that students complete a three-month clinical internship at a hospital.

But when it comes to career enhancement, these changes may not always be enough. Last year Peter Francis earned a "mini-MBA" certificate from Rutgers, hoping it would give him a better understanding of business theory. And while he says that enrolling in the course showed his employer he was proactive, he felt the curriculum was too crammed and skimmed over each topic too much to teach anything substantive; after all, the class consisted of six days of actual instruction, with no final exam.

"We touched on things, but never really got into the nuts and bolts," says the 45-year-old sales rep. His next step? He's thinking about getting a full-fledged MBA.

Making the Grade

Many schools are pushing certificate programs, groups of related courses packaged together -- but quality can vary widely. We spoke with academic experts to find out how you can tell the A-list programs from the duds.

• Get the syllabus in advance. If lecture topics stray from what's written on paper, complain to the program's coordinator. Some schools, including the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, have "satisfaction guarantees" that promise refunds if you're not satisfied.

• Evaluate your instructor. Coordinators should keep past students' instructor evaluations on hand. Ask to see copies that include comments, not just an average rating, and be persistent -- evaluations are almost always anonymous, so the coordinator should have no reason not to show them to you.

• Read the fine print. Some schools, such as Colorado State University, issue a certificate of completion once students finish, say, a Microsoft Certification Program. But that doesn't necessarily mean anything: Microsoft considers you certified only once you've taken an exam that isn't always included in the program itself.

• Look for links to associations. Some of the most stringent programs are those nationally regulated by professional groups. Each time the Financial Planning Certificate is offered at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, a qualified expert reviews and updates the curriculum.

• Check on credit transfers. You can sometimes earn credit for courses that you may later decide to apply toward a certificate or a degree. But not all universities accept continuing-education credits -- even if you're applying to another department within the same school. Check with the registrar's office to find out which courses are preapproved for transfer before you fork over nonrefundable fees.