Reid's classification of higher education in the USA

FYI

During my research, I have found that Reid (1963, p.162) has given probably the most balanced summation of higher education, as it applies to the US:

a) Regionally accredited institutions falling under GAAP, whose credits are transferable between like institutions
b) Unaccredited, but state licensed/ approved institutions who have established good standards, but credits are generally not accepted as transfer credits to GAAP institutions.
c) Unaccredited, but state licensed/ approved institutions which are ‘substandard’, but seek to offer programs of some educational value in exchange for the student dollar
d) The outright degree mills whose essential objective is a profit to the owners.

Reid, Robert (1963). Degree Mills in the United States. Education, General. New York, Columbia University.

Cheers,

George

 

Thanks for sharing, George.

Back To The Future ....

For a study done in 1959 and published in 1963 (over 42 years ago), Reid's portrait of the degree/diploma mill scourge bears some surprising resemblance to what pertains today.

Some may view his descriptions of some aspects of what we know today as DL as unnecessarily harsh. One review states:

"Digital Diploma Mills The Automation of Higher Education
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/index.html

"In this article by David Noble, published in FirstMonday, he states that the new innovations being implemented in many higher education departments and classrooms are not a move forward, but actually a move back to the days of "mass-production and standardization purely for commercial interests".

"Robert Reid conducted a study on diploma mills in 1959 for the American Council on Education. In his report, Reid characterized diploma mills as having "no classrooms", "faculties are often untrained or nonexistent" and "the officers are unethical self-seekers whose qualifications are no better than their offerings".

"This article discusses these characteristics in relation to the current state of higher education."

Excerpted from "Unaccredited Institutions and Distance Education Scams"

How very interesting!

The mills and shills have been around. Will they continue to be around (forever)? Your guess is as good as mine.

Thanks.

 

Hi George. I don't know that I'd call Reid's classifications a balanced summation of American higher education. To arrive at that, you really need to flesh things out quite a bit.

Here's some ideas in that direction that I had while reading Reid's schema. Sorry for the post's length and disorganization, but I know that you are interested in this stuff.

That's insufficient treatment of the accredited sector. Reid devotes most of his categories to non-accredited schools, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the non-accredited schools are the borderline exceptions, not the mainstream rule. In most cases, it's safe to ignore non-accredited schools entirely when talking about the US higher education system.

If we want to get a handle on the variety of degree-granting institutions with recognized accreditation, I like the Carnegie Classification:

http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/Classification/CIHE2000/PartIfiles/partI.htm

It classifies institutions by function, distinguishing the doctoral-research institutions, masters and bachelors schools of various sorts, specialized subject-specific schools ranging from military academies, through art, law and medical schools, to religious seminaries. And the associates or community colleges.

CHEA's directory overlaps with that. It includes all the schools accredited by CHEA-recognized accreditors, without further classifying them. That includes not only degree-granting schools, but also lots of accredited non-degree-granting schools that need to be considered in a complete classification.

http://www.chea.org

That brings up an issue that an Australian like yourself may not have considered. In many countries, higher and further education are clearly and cleanly distinguished. But in the US, the university sector shades imperceptibly into the vocational post-secondary sector without any clear distinctions being drawn between them.

I recognize the distinction, but don't really know how to clearly define it. I envision it as a spectrum, where distinctions are continuous and where precise determinations might involve individual taste.

At one end, there are things like the University of California at Merced. This is a new state university, intended to quickly become a significant B&M research university in the 30,000 student class, and it currently has a tremendous construction project underway. Lots of money is being poured into this. But it's currently non-accredited. In fact, it technically isn't even CA-approved, since government owned and operated schools have a waiver from the approval requirements.

http://www.ucmerced.edu

So I'm inclined to create a special category for new schools that are clearly and obviously on an accreditation track.

Unfortunately, as you move down the food chain, it becomes less and less clear which non-accredited schools really are on an accreditation track. Some schools talk up a storm but never do anything. And the accreditors' upcoming site-visit lists always have something surprising that nobody would have predicted.

Some provision has to be made for non-accredited schools that offer degree programs in cooperation with accredited schools. The CA-approved Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley/Mtn. View offers a masters in conjunction with the Graduate Theological Union. This category vaguely resembles that peculiarly British university vs. college "validation" thing.

http://www.shin-ibs.edu

Moving on down, there's things like the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. This one shows no apparent interest in seeking accreditation. It offers CA-approved masters and doctoral degrees in a unique niche subject where there is very little competition from accredited schools. (It also maintains what is probably the world's largest collection of pornography.) So... is this flaky, or is it a valuable research institution? I opt for he latter, but I realize that not everyone is going to follow me there.

http://www.iashs.edu

And what in the world should we make of Horoshi Motoyama and his subtle and spiritual energies?

"Spiritual energy is a power capable of creating matter, which saints of various religions, be it Yoga, Daoism, Christianity, or Islamic Sufism, embody through their respective esoteric practices._ They use it for healing people's sicknesses, and it was also used when Christ divided a loaf of bread...

CIHS is conducting research on ki-energy employing a measuring device called AMI (an apparatus for measuring the function of meridians and their corresponding internal organs) which Motoyama invented".

http://www.cihs.edu/cihs/president.asp

I'm sure that Motoyama is sincere, but where does this one register on the credibility meter? (Mine didn't budge much.) Subtle energies are going to be a matter of taste, I think.

There's several issues mixed up here.

The possibility exists that an academically credible school might be operating outside the law, without the proper approvals. A possible example of that is something called the World Hongming Academy of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

http://www.hongming.us/academy/en-main.htm

It operates from a California address, offers DL Ph.D.s, but doesn't appear on the BPPVE list. But the Chinese immigrant who runs it seems to be taken seriously by academic philosophers back in the PRC and his journal looks to me to have a reasonably high standard. Despite it's apparent flouting of California education law, it might be one of the better DL places to study Taoism. (If only because it's one of the only places.)

I think that a lot, perhaps most, of the non-accredited schools are individual proprietorships. They are owned by somebody who for some reason wants to operate his own little personal university. Real universities, including private ones, have their own institutional identity and are rarely the plaything of any one man. So I think that an aspect of schools that merits closer attention is their ownership and organizational structure.

Whether or not it is operated as a money making enterprise doesn't necessarily define whether a school is a mill. The University of Phoenix is as focused on profit as any mill. I get the impression that many of the owners of non-accredited universities operate their schools because they have a passion for some often off-beat subject, or simply because they want to be a university owner for purely egotistical reasons. Just because the owner is a sincere crank or an egotistical blowhard doesn't necessarily make their schools better than those operated by greedy jerks who are just out for the money. So my bottom line is academic credibility, I think, more than owner's motivation. True motivation is often hard to discern anyway.

We can define the lowest cruddiest level of mill as those schools that simply sell phony diplomas. But what about prior learning assessment or whatever trendy French name it's going under now? Many of the worst mills try to obscure what they are doing by pretending that they are offering PLA assessments. So there should be some means of distinguishing credible assessments from mills' life-experience degrees. Unfortunately, without accreditation that might not even be possible, since most of the remaining extra-accreditation indicators of academic credibility are simply missing in PLA.

 

Thanks for the intelligent stuff, guys.