A money-saving partnership between the American National Standards Institute and NYU Polytechnic Institute was announced last week. The partnership will allow full ANSI members to receive a 10 percent rebate when taking an online course through NYU-Poly.
Lisa Ann Bellantuono, program coordinator of Enterprise Learning at NYU-Poly, said that the partnership would help to raise more awareness of NYU-Poly’s online graduate program, NYU e-Poly.
“[The program] provides 17 online master’s degrees and advance certificates,” said Bellantuono.
NYU-Poly, which maintains partnerships with the Associate for Computing Machinery, the Associate of Information Technology Professionals, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the New York Academy and The Wall Street Technology Associate, is the first local school to partner with ANSI.
“Our NYU-Poly Enterprise Learning Department is in charge of locating such societies with similar interests in technology, science and engineering. These agreements are a key marketing strategy for our online graduate program,” said Bellantuono.
Although NYU-Poly has agreed to the partnership, ANSI took the opportunity to announce the partnership without consulting NYU-Poly, and without allowing the school to issue its own press release or participate in a joint statement.
“While it is indeed great that the account has generated such an active PR, we would ourselves not have considered it special news. The Institute, on the other hand, did,” said Katepalli Raju Sreenivasan, NYU-Poly’s provost and acting president.
According to Elizabeth Neiman, senior director of communications and public relations at ANSI, the institute wanted to connect with NYU-Poly so that it could branch out to students with varying interests. She noted that among the graduate degrees offered by NYU e-Poly are bioinformatics, cybersecurity, manufacturing engineering, project management and wireless innovation.
“ANSI is focused on outreach to students of all types — whether they are part of an undergraduate or graduate program, whether they are taking continuing education courses or whether they are focused on earning workforce-related credentials like certifications or training certificates,” said Neiman.
However, Neiman stressed that the tuition rebate is reserved for full members of the institute and does not apply to the general public or non-ANSI members.
She hopes that the rebate would allow students to save some money while getting their education.
NYU-Poly freshman Tahsina Islam said that although students might save money by taking an online course, the experience is different from one in a classroom with a live professor.
“I personally would not take the online course because I prefer having a teacher in front of me teaching and to be physically interacting with the students around me,” said Tahsina. “I feel that being at an engineering school, having student-student interaction is really essential.”
Online courses are also available to NYU undergraduate and graduate students, pending their adviser approval.
This year, NYU-Poly came in ninth place for best online graduate engineering program by U.S. News and World Report’s rankings. The school also received the Outstanding Online Program distinction from Sloan Consortium
A version of this article appeared in the print edition. Neela Qadir is a deputy university editor. Email her at [email protected].
