For anyone that is looking into attending this college, do yourself a favor--DON'T!!! I have completed 6 courses with CTU and have not learned anything. I have a 4.0 G.P.A. but I think that an average 7th grade student would have no problem accomplishing that at this school. The syllabus is pretty much the same for every class, so you have a hard time trying to follow guidelines for assignments because they may not be relevant to the assignment. The Live Chat Sessions are a complete waste of time; the "professors" spend at least a quarter of the time talking about unrelated subjects like the weather or basketball. In the Real World Writing class that I took, the teacher had the students do free-writing assignments which required us to write for 5 minutes about whatever the random prompt was. Then after we were done she would say, "OK, good", and move on to pointless vocabulary exercises that I did in elementary school, without reviewing our writing. She did not go over any of the assignments or requirements in the chats and everything that she went over had nothing to do with the class. That was just one course experience. I have more that I will not mention for the sake of trying to keep this short.

Then there are the discussion boards that require students to post assignments that the rest of the class can read, who are then required to respond to the initial posting of two students. Let me tell you that the majority (I'm talking 95%) of the students in these classes have the reading comprehension level and writing capacity of a 3rd grader. I could not believe some of the assignments and responses that some students submitted-- multiple spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, and absolutely no intelligent feedback with the exception of one or two students per class. There should not be spelling and grammar errors in college. I am outraged at the amount of money I am paying for these classes ($1,159 per class) and the utter failure of the professors to educate. College is supposed to be an educational experience, not just going through simple motions to earn a degree. I find it very hard to believe that this school, at least based on the online courses, received national accreditation. Words cannot express how disappointed I am with the experience that I have had so far with CTU. I don't think that this college has any sort of exclusivity (I doubt that they turn anybody

It's pretty bad when I am more intelligent than my professors.

My advice to anyone that wants to learn something in college: attend a college other than CTU. Before signing up for any college, I strongly suggest doing research and looking for student reviews like this one. Sure, you can obtain a degree from CTU, but you won't learn much in your time spent with them. If all you want is the piece of paper to show as evidence that you did the grunt work for a degree, and you aren't looking for a challenge, then CTU is the school for you. If you actually want to expand your education and take something away from college for your career, I suggest finding a college more concerned with quality education.

I must start by saying that I graduated with a 4.0 at CTU, so I'm not just another disgruntled student who thought he/she was going to get an easy ride; I put a lot of time and effort into earning my degree at CTU. I went above and beyond on my assignments to try to really understand the subject matter. Learning the material was really important to me, not just getting an A with the least amount of work possible.

Overall, CTU is not a very good value. The school is among the most expensive there is for online programs. The programs are really a joke in my opinion. First, the school tries to use the same exact syllabus for each class, which just doesn't work out very well. In other words, you end up writing a paper on math instead of actually doing/learning math problems. Secondly, the discussion board postings are worthless. Every week you have to participate in discussion boards, but there is never really any meaningful discussion going on. The discussion postings are mainly students who can barely read or spell posting comments such as, "great work, keep it up!" Third, you get virtually no help from the professors. During my time at CTU I tried to contact professors on several occasions to ask questions/seek more help on various subjects. I never received an answer of any sort. I was always told to Google it or watch the class lecture. I did watch the class lecture, but needed some additional explanation. What is the point of having experienced professors if they are just going to tell you to Google it? They don't even "teach" during the lectures; they simply read a PowerPoint slide to the class. Fourth, many times the subject matter was off base. For instance, in the object-oriented design class we wrote a procedural based program, not an object-oriented program. WTH? I got a 99 for the class, but didn't really learn much about object-oriented design. I learned more about object-oriented design within an hour of reading Head First Java on my own time than I did during the entire object-oriented design course at CTU. It seems that you are graded more for your ability to write than you are for understanding the subject matter. I will say that the technology is top notch, but it does little to overcome the weaknesses in curriculum. Fifth, financial aid was also dishonest with me. They are pressured to tell students whatever they need to tell them to get the most money possible. I explicitly explained to financial aid that I didn't want to take more classes than my student loans would cover in a year and if I had to drag out the length of the program that was fine. The main point was that I didn't want to have to pay out-of-pocket. Of course they told me I had plenty of available loan money and kept me enrolled in the maximum number of classes each term. Next thing you know, they said I'd need to pay $8000 for the remainder of the year because I had already used up all my loan money. I paid because I had no choice if I wanted to finish. This really left a sour taste in my mouth. Before this happened, my opinion of CTU was just that they were any other business with good intentions but simply had a very weak program. To me, the dishonesty there showed me they are worse than that - cons out to extort as much money as possible from their students in as short a time as possible.

I'll leave with this: the program is very, very easy and you won't really learn much, even if you go above and beyond. But, you will earn an accredited degree. If you're a working adult that hasn't been in school in over 20 years and consider yourself weak academically, you might benefit a little from CTU's degree program. Otherwise, there are much better schools such as UMASS (same price as CTU) and Western Governors ($6000 per year) for the same price or less than CTU. The important thing to remember here as potential students ponder attending CTU is that earning a degree is not the answer, it's really what you do with the knowledge gained. With that said, I cannot recommend CTU for 95% of the population. You'll end up with $50k in debt with little skills or knowledge to show for it. Even if another school such as Western Governors were found to be no better, at least you'd only be $12k in debt, not $50k.

I only posted this review because I don't want other students to be in the same boat I'm in; that is, a lot of debt with little education. I'm looking into attending another institution and earning a second degree just because I feel that my time spend with CTU was pretty much useless. I hope that those reading this won't make the same mistake I did. Please, find another school to attend.

When I first started at CTU I was very skeptical about the value of the degree considering the price. However, today I can say I am very happy I did it. I graduated from CTU in June of 2011. Since then I have enrolled into a local college to obtain my bachelors degree. I have recently landed employment with a company that is full of great promising opportunities.

These two accomplishments in my life would not have taken place without CTU. I believe the money I spent was worth every penny and it does not bother me one bit that this school is a for profit organization, they provided me a great service and I am happy with them.

I enrolled in this school and because i didnt log in to a very specific part of the site which no one could tell me what it was or where I was kicked out. On top of that, I still had to pay the student loan they set up for me. When I called them to talk about it I was told that there was nothing I could do about it and that I would have to just pay the loan. The school is a complete rip off and will take your hard earned money any way they can.

The professors I had were top notch, and the Virtual Campus was well done.