American Public University System Reviews

Cons

Several managers by their own admission are not gainfully employed and therefore have not been properly educated for their current positions. It's important for mangers to have actually studied management because there's a science to it that just cannot be completely utilized without the formal education.

Cons

1. Favoritism. If you know how to brown nose, you get to be promoted. You just know how to rub shoulders with the big guys. And if you bring up work ethics, they think you are too opinionated and not following the crowd. They prefer people who are not leaders, but those willing to follow orders. And so if you know the game, you can go very far.
Advice to management: people are not blind or stupid. If you give everyone an equal fighting chance, you'd be surprised how some employees fare better than those at the very top of the food chain in terms of intellect and commitment.

2. Overwhelming work. If they put something more on your plate, you won't be able to remove anything else that was there before on your already full plate. You end up having meetings the whole day and then do more work in the evening and weekends. You hardly have any time to breathe despite the fact that they say remote work gives you flexibility. Flexibility allows you to do your laundry in the middle of the day because you are at home to do it, but that doesn't mean the work is less. I have worked in other higher ed institutions and this is by far the worst ever. Worst.
Advice to management: re-examine workload. This trickles down to proper training of managers and supervisors in terms of understanding workflow and essential time management for each work assignment. Training managers to understand the human elements - people do need to pay bills but they are not servants who work on anything that you throw at them. Unhappy employees make APUS look like a dumpster of mismatches whose looking for a temporary place to work and they poison the workplace further when more and more people become unhappy and overwhelm. LOOK at The Best Places to Work List and see how you don't even come close to any of the Qualities of these amazing companies. Perhaps, just perhaps, have the decency to emulate the best practices to try to become one.

3. APUS Academic team questions the professors who teach classes where there are high withdrawals from students or high failing rate of students. These are, for example, the typical courses students struggle: the Accounting courses, Math courses, Statistics, etc. Why punish the professors than to admit APUS is desperate for students they just accept anyone despite their low college readiness and low commitment to succeed as a student?
Advice to Management: There should be a better pre college readiness program to orient these older and unprepared students before they are allowed to register for these college level courses. For APUS, they are so eager to get the numbers in (oh, look we have so and so number of students who graduate!) that they forget the very foundation higher education is based on. The bad quality of students = frustrated professors + unprepared workforce for the future.

Cons

Treats employees like children

Cons

In less than a year this place went from an amazing company to work for with great values and inclusive culture to a heaping dumpster fire. I always thought APUS would be immune to the corporate culture of trying to force long-term employees out to hire cheaper, newer labor willing to work worse hours but here we are today and that's exactly what has been happening.

This place has become a revolving door of people coming, staying for 3-6 months and realizing it sucks, then leaving once they find a better job with normal hours. The few long-term people who have been here for more than a couple years are also leaving because more work and expectations are being dumped on them. Managers have dozens of people on their teams and are overworked as well. We lost a ton of people in the last year due to multiple circumstances so everyone left is expected to just make sacrifices because they either won't or can't hire people to fill in the places. People tend to make it to the job interviews, find out what the position requires, then run screaming out the door. The only ones willing to take the jobs and shifts are kids fresh out of college who need the resume experience.

There were rumors that certain CEOs were trying to kill off most of the company so that it could be bought out by a bigger name for-profit college system. I didn't want to believe it, but that's the only logic I can see behind all these changes outside of just a flat out drive for money at the expense of experienced employees that know the educational policies.

Unless upper management does something quick, this place is just going to keep up this rapid death spiral and end up as a penny-stock begging for scraps from some bigger company to buy it out and try to salvage at least some of what was originally built by the founding presidents and deans. What a disgrace. They're really trying to highlight the 'for-profit' aspect of what should be a respected institute of higher education that prioritizes student success over squeezing every last dollar out of everyone by running the place as ramshackle as possible to keep overhead costs low and profits for shareholders high.

Oh, and don't expect any sort of upward movement in terms of positions or promotions. Anything like that is a rarity, and if they do post a position they already know who they want so good luck with that.

Cons

Same pay for the last eight years, but work load has greatly increased. We used to have to reply to 1/3 of the students each week, and now it is half, plus we must be present in the classroom one day on weekends. Very low pay by industry standards. The courses are full of errors that embarrass the instructor, and require extra work to fix. Administrators have been quitting -- not a good sign for the health of the company.

Cons

No chance of getting a permanent position.

Cons

Poor executive leadership; new executive leadership not interested in employees, corporate culture has degraded to point where people are just doing their jobs to get their paycheck.

Cons

Health insurance is very expensive. You are only allowed to carry two weeks of leave from one year to the next, so if you don't use it you lose it. There is very little room for growth and promotion in some departments

Cons

Senior management says they want new ideas, but they don't. They seem insecure with management staff being able to operate independently.

Cons

Too much favoritism. No pay increases. HR is one sided.