Is there no hope for 'Prodigal Son'?

30 years ago - after finishing all course work except thesis - I foolishly let a conflict with a MS (Psych) thesis advisor keep me from completing degree. Now for "funding" reasons I need to complete the MS - or at least have the appearance of having done so. Nobody will transfer 30 year old credits and most willing to grant degrees - appear to be scams. Is there any legitimate school that will let me finish the thesis or take a couple of courses "in lieu of"
Please help a Prodigal Son.

 

Rollychuck: Nobody will transfer 30 year old credits and most willing to grant degrees - appear to be scams.

Yes to both. Perhaps "all" instead of "most." The best hope, I think, would be to make a major effort to try to persuade the school itself. This is not necessarily an outrageous notion -- especially in a field where, unlike physics or biology, your knowledge is not hopeless out of date. At the Master's level, things go on much more relevantly in the department than in the registrars or admmissions office. Rules are much more readily stretched or bent, especially if one has an advocate, a promoter in the department. Who teaches there now? Do you know any? If you check them out on the internet or otherwise, are there any that you relate to, or who are doing things of interest to you? If one of them got a "Look, I know this may be ridiculous but..." letter -- or even an invitation to lunch for a matter of great importance -- the worst that happens is no worse than where you are now.

Good luck.

John Bear

Major Major Major: "You can't do that. What if everyone did that?"
Yossarian: "Then I'd be crazy not to."

 

John Bear,
Thanks. Sounds like good advice to me. I'll give it a shot and let you know.
RC

 

Good luck with this.

I mention in some books the situation where I got a letter from a man who said he'd been asked to leave Columbia University in 1913 (maybe it was 1914), and really wanted to finish the doctorate he'd started there. I replied, mentioning the amusing typo in his letter. He explained that it really had been then, and he was now 96 years old, his wife of 70 years had died, and he was bored out of his skull. According to him, the political science department said that his proposed thesis on the probable causes of a coming world war was so off-the-wall, they could not support it.

I thought this would be a marvelous public relations move for Columbia, to readmit him -- but they wrote a stiff letter back and declined.

The man in question did find a school* willing to acknowledge his Columbia work, his many other publications, his decades of public service, etc., and admit him for a thesis-only program. His unsettling topic: the probable causes of a coming world war. He got his doctorate at 98 or 99.
_________
* Which one, I hear you asking. As I explain in the "Bending the Rules" section of Bears' Guide, there are many cases of schools bending significantly but anonymously, for concern about what their accreditors, trustees, alumni, etc. might say, and for even greater fear of a deluge: "I want to do just what that guy did..."