Ranku Launches Comparison Shopping Site For Legit Online Universities

Scummy for-profit schools like University of Phoenix spend big bucks to rope students into mediocre educations. So?Ranku?launches today to help students find a reputable online university. Its site lets you browse different programs, and compare their price, online interface, and performance of graduates. The TechStars-backed Ranku wants to bring transparency to the sketchy business of choosing a digital education. Here’s the problem. Lots of people want to go to school online so they can get a more affordable education from home, even if they’re on a tight schedule. 16 million students were enrolled this year. That’s spawned a rapidly growing ecosystem of online schools. There’s traditional, legitimate, non-profit private, public, and state schools like Stanford, Georgetown, and University Of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. There are only 100 non-profit schools operating at scale online now, and they account for just 1 million of the 16 million students. That’s because there are for-profit schools like University Of Phoenix Online, Kaplan, Everest, and Art Institutes which studies have shown produce graduates who earn less, are more likely to be unemployed, and have higher debt. But since for-profit schools can make so much money from each student, they’ve developed aggressive online marketing tactics to sucker people in. They’ll pay sky-high prices for ads on education-related content, and even split tuition with any site that delivers them an enrollee. There are whole networks of sites devoted to funneling people into for-profit schools. That makes it tough to find an online university without getting scammed. Everyone’s trying to sell you to the highest bidder. A Yelp For Universities Ranku?solves this by barring all for-profit schools from its online education comparison shopping site. It only features non-profit schools. Through curation and Facebook login-based personalization, its goal is to show you the best and most relevant universities. There’s no massive open online classes (MOOCs) or places to dabble in learning. Just schools where you can get a full-fledged online degree that’s an equivalent of what you could get on a campus. You can search for a specific school or type of program, or browse top universities. Each school’s Ranku page includes info on?descriptions of available degrees,?price, minimum GPA, application due date, if you get to walk at a physical graduation ceremony, faculty profiles, student testimonials, and links to apply. To let you “know-before-you-go”, Ranku breaks down the features of each school’s online education interface, such as mobile

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