My experience with NCU has been great. I have been in the Doctoral program there since April 2005, and I achieved my Doctoral Candidacy status in July. I am in the business school and I can’t speak for the other programs, but in the NCU user groups there is very little, if anything, bad or negative said about the school (though some Mentors are singled out.) I can say that in my 14 classes, so far, I only had 1 bad mentor; he was “unqualified at best", but he also taught at my daughter’s brick and mortar school in her MBA program at another college. In any distance-learning class setting, the student takes on responsibility for motivation and identifying their potential issues early. I have had no issues at all in the workload or the expectations. I have recommended to the school to many others including my daughter.

My miserable experience at NCU was very similar to that described by Jonathan below. I also had a complete idiot for a professor the first doctoral dissertation course. Uncommunicative, disinterested, cursory, didn't even bother to read my stuff, said it was okay then changed his mind after it was too late to fix it. Total bull****. And likewise, instead of acknowledging and correcting the instructor issues, the administration contrived to dismiss me instead. This despite my 4.0 GPA and prepayment of the complete program. If you are thinking about attending this rotten, disgusting excuse for a school, think again. If you are enrolled already, take your credits and transfer to another school ASAP. Your academic future is in peril. This school is in trouble with its accreditors (only a three year renewal) and may be out of business before you graduate. Don't waste your time and money on an inferior school that screws over its students.

I had a terrible experience at NCU. they have a very non-interactive, non-committal method of communication & teaching. I lost $1600 and did not learn a thing. My mentor (professor) did not allow me to call him. He required that all my questions be sent to him in a Word document (versus email) and that they be sent to him using the very antiquated person to person messaging system that is available through the student portal. Mind you, this is NOT an email system. it is a message system. It takes one back 15 years in terms of messaging. Additionally, the reponses back from my prof were 1 word answers .. try better .. try the (limited/unhelpful) online library .. redo your phrasing here .. etc. other than a couple grammatical errors, I did not learn anything from my course and after trying to fight for a refund, simply just cancelled. I would really like to help anyone out that is thinking/planning to goto this course. I strongly recommend UC Irvine and other such univeristy's online courses. best,

I had the unfortunate experience of having a couple of professors at Northcentral University (NCU) who didn't even minimally meet their minimum responsibilities as instructors. In a nutshell, they barely participated at all. The class in question, RSH890A-B, is the first research class that leads up to the doctoral dissertation. This is a critical class that sets the foundation for the final dissertation. The student attrition rate at this point in any doctoral program is high because of the difficulty. Active mentorship is absolutely critical to the success of the NCU student at this point. I suggest that a lack of active mentorship would result in a higher than normal student attrition rate. When my instructor's conduct was brought to the attention of the Dean of the school via the appeals process, she chose not to acknowledge and correct the instructor issues. Dean Turner's decision was to academically dismiss me instead. I started the RSH890A-B classes as a student in good academic and financial standing. I had a respectable GPA of 3.58. I had also prepaid the complete program.

Going to an online university definitely has its perks. And since Northcentral is an 100% online, I took a lot of classes in my pjs! I liked being able to take classes in my home and having to worry about commuting, leaving my kids, etc. Classes also start once a month, so you don't have to wait for the semester or quarter to begin, and you can take months off too if you get too busy to keep up. However, not ever personally interacting my professors is kind of a weird experience. Northcentral does attempt to do rectify this problem with one on one mentoring and faculty, which does make the experience slightly more intimate, which is what I feel the experience is lacking. I am not sure if I would do it again, if I would make it an online experience because you don't feel accountable to anyone. That being said, Northcentral was a good experience. Northcentral is disgustingly expensive tuition itself is close to $15,000... there are some actually university programs that are cheaper!!