Promising all the business wisdom of Donald Trump in a series of dazzling CD-ROM’s, DVD’s, and online courses, Trump University opened its virtual doors last week.
But how much The Donald will mean on your résumé is hard to tell. Students won’t have to take a single test, and the university won’t be issuing any degrees.
The well-known tycoon, who also spreads his teachings by way of the reality-TV show The Apprentice, on NBC, has decided to add for-profit education to his business empire, which also includes real estate and bottled water.
The university’s Web site includes a section describing “How Your Life Will Change” after taking a Trump course, and it promises a money-back guarantee on its services (http://www.trumpuniversity.com).
The site lists four academics as “subject-matter experts and faculty members” for Trump: Jack M. Kaplan, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurial studies at Columbia University’s Business School; John W. Lounsbury, a professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville; Don Sexton, a professor of decision, risk, and operations at Columbia Business School; and John H. Vogel Jr., an adjunct professor of business administration at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.
Mr. Vogel said in an interview that he hopes Mr. Trump’s name will bring a wide audience to the university’s courses, but he noted that “like almost anyone who’s in the public eye, people have different reactions to Donald Trump.” Even so, he said, most of his students watch The Apprentice.
Mr. Vogel said that the how-to course he designed for Trump, “Buy a House ... the Right Way,” is far different from his real-estate courses at Dartmouth, which deal with theories and big-picture ideas about the industry.
Mr. Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said in a written statement that “people need education fast, and it has to be practical.” Trump University, he said, is on its way to “becoming the nation’s top lifelong-learning partner for the business professional.”
The cost of Trumping your education isn’t cheap, though. One of the university’s offerings, a seven-DVD set promising that “you cannot fail to transform your future,” runs $396. A “limited number” of “signature edition” copies of the DVD’s, signed by Mr. Trump, cost $591 per set.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 51, Issue 39, Page A24