Tiny Ottawa startup college operates on the fringes
Ottawa’s least-known college is an unaccredited business school, run online by a Transport Canada economist, whose address is a rented mailbox at Dymon Storage on Coventry Road.
The Ottawa School of Business and Economics has a colourful website, but no buildings or phone numbers. It says that its nine faculty members work for nothing because students pay no tuition. There are about 20 students. It advertises 26 diploma and certificate programs in these fields among others: office administration, management of e-commerce, project management, economics (general), agricultural economics, demographic economics, and general mathematics.
The school claims to be accredited by Ontario’s Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills
Development, but it is not on the official ministry list of accredited private colleges. A ministry official confirmed that it “is not currently a registered institution under the Private Career Colleges Act.”
Instead, the school has permission to offer courses as long as the total cost of a program is under $1,000. Such ultracheap programs don’t need the usual college accreditation in Ontario.
The school’s website says it is “working ... toward obtaining proper accreditation to grant university level degrees by 2018,” including doctorates.
That hasn’t happened yet.
There are many photos from stock agencies that brighten up the website: The main photo on the home page (supposedly showing its own graduates) is a Shutterstock image, used on websites in Russia, Pakistan, Britain and even by a Nissan dealership in Calgary. The smiling librarian on another page also appears in materials for National School Librarian Day in the U.S.
The Current Students page uses a photo from the cover of a German language textbook, Direkt Deutsch, without attribution.
Yet the little business school is recruiting students. Anyone with a high school diploma and $30 can sign up — tuition-free, the college says. Courses are advertised as a blend of online and classroom study, and applicants are warned: “Please note that the admission process is very competitive.”
Exams “are administered online, and/or in person when possible,” the website says.
“The OSBE is a not-for-profit, accredited educational institute committed to providing equal access to affordable education. The OSBE is also committed to supporting its graduates in their search for an appropriate job after graduation. We do this by providing resume writing, job search, and referral supports,” it says.
“The school’s Senate oversees the development, delivery, and evaluation of programs and courses.
“OSBE is currently negotiating agreements with several universities in Canada and internationally to facilitate our students and graduates to purse their higher educational goals without having have (sic) to worry about transferring their credits. OSBE is also in the process of making appropriate connections in the Canadian and international labour markets to help our graduates to obtain a good job after graduation.”
The founder and president is Massoud Khazabi, an economic adviser at Transport Canada whose LinkedIn profile shows he received a PhD in economics from uOttawa in 2010.
Khazabi said in a series of emails that he is running a startup college with big aspirations and a vision of offering free education.
“We founded the institution in 2014, but we have been actively offering programs since last year. Currently we have around 20 students who are enrolled in our economics programs. We are limited in the number of students we admit and teach each year, as we have very limited financial resources to fund our operation. Our programs are open to international audience, however, the priority is given to Canadian residents.”
To do this free of charge, he says, faculty are all volunteers, and staff are paid from donations. He wouldn’t say how much the school raises in donations, but wrote in an email: “Not a lot, it has been mostly a one-man-job so far, maybe with your help we would gain better traction.”
He added: “We don’t seek any financial benefits and our objective is not to earn income/profit.”
The college has a strong connection to the University of Ottawa: most of its listed faculty members are recent uOttawa grads in economics or math.
And the business school’s logo — a stylized ancient Greek building — is a close copy of uOttawa’s.
The business school has, however, had to backtrack after listing some people as faculty members without their knowledge.
Rafat Alam, who teaches at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, was a friend and classmate of Khazabi in Ottawa a decade ago and says the two discussed possibly forming an online university. But nothing happened for years, until one day someone told Alam he was listed as a faculty member at a school he had never heard of.
Alam says he called Khazabi and asked to have his name removed, and Khazabi did so.
The school website also removed a second person from the faculty list, and Alam says that was for a similar reason.
Another person on the faculty list is Nguyen Van Quyen, who has taught economics at the University of Ottawa for years. But he says he doesn’t teach there, either. He replied by email to a question from this newspaper: “I know nothing about The Ottawa School of Business and Economics.”
The school is certified by Employment and Social Development Canada to offer T2202A slips for claiming a tax credit for tuition, though there’s no explanation of why a tuition-free college would do this.
At Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business, professor Ian Lee views any diploma from the little startup as having little value to students.
He says most employers would ignore graduates “from unknown organizations with no track record.”
“Leading university business schools such as Sprott or Ivey (at Western University) build their education brand — in their undergraduate and graduate degrees — over a long period of time with a track record of very successful alums who go on to success in business, in addition to the scholarly research of the faculty members,” he said.
“The brand of the school becomes a ‘proxy’ for the intelligence and discipline and success of the student graduate.
“An unknown school is simply unknown with no track record.”
We are limited in the number of students we admit and teach each year, as we have very limited financial resources.