Heritage University

Can anyone tell me Heritage University is accredited in USA or not? URL: http://heritageuniv.net/about.html

Thanks.

 

A search for

reveals this page.

So the answer is no. It is not accredited.

Remember Google is your friend. It can answer almost anything if you ask it the right way.

 

No one believes and professes that more than I; but it's not the right way to determine if an institution is accredited.

For that, one must interrogate the databases at:

• The USDE Database
  
  and/or (preferably "and")
  
• The CHEA Database

Anything else -- even Google -- is just hit-or-miss.

 

Thank you for your information.

May I know what the difference is between a state approved university and national accredited university in USA?

Is it good for studying the DBA program offered by a state approved university like Heritage University in California?

 

I searched USDE & CHEA database but cannot find the Heritage University. So, does it imply it is a degree mill? What is the difference between a stated approved university like this one and a national accredited university in USA?

Will it be worthwhile to study a state approved university in USA?

Many thanks for your advice.

 

The risk is double.

A. What if they fail in getting the CA approval, the kind of approval they have now is temporary and pending inspection, what if they fail?

B. what if their DETC accreditation be denied.

At this time they are provisionally approved in CA, to new
we don't know anything about this school, not the quality of education they provide.

It's a gamble.

State approved degree from unaccredited university has very limited utility and usually not recognized in other countries.

learner

 

Heritage University is not a degree mill. They never would have gotten their California state approval if they were. It is just that they are so new (founded in 2003) that they haven't gotten accreditation as yet. Every school starts out as an unaccredited institution as they need some track record before the accreditors will even look at them. State approval might work in your case or it might not, as I don't know the particulars of your case. Perhaps someone who knows a bit more about accreditation issues might chime in and speak to the worth of state approval as compared to accreditation. And, on the other hand, Heritage might be accredited by the time you graduate.

 

It's a risk. These kind of places (privately owned new school start-up) can quickly go out of business or turn to the dark side (diploma mill land). It's a gamble.

 

A fairly expensive risk at $330.00 per semester hour. There are cheaper, well established, even DETC accredited D/L law programs out there. Taft, for instance.

Heritage may well receive California State Approval but at the moment they aren't eligible for DETC accreditation because they offer the D.B.A.

Heritage is also ineligible for regional accreditation because WASC won't accredit any school that operates a non CalBar accredited law school and CalBar doesn't accredit D/L law schools.

Bottom line: Heritage isn't accredited and isn't eligible for accreditation. This is the kind of situation where state approval does not necessarily imply low quality, however.

As Bill Huffman says, "It's a gamble."

 

I'm not sure I understand this. Columbia Southern is part of DETC's pilot doctoral project with their proposed DBA. But Heritage University is ineligible for DETC accreditation because of their DBA.

 

I'd have to look at the rules DETC imposes on its pilot project to be sure, but I think I remember reading that a school needs to have been DETC accredited for a minimum of two years before it can participate.

 

Here's an overview of the American system (there's actually nothing systematic about it, it's an ad-hoc arrangement that evolved over time and wasn't created at one sitting):

In order to legally operate as a private degree-granting higher-education institution in any of the 50 American states, a school has to have the approval (some states call it something else) of the education authorities of the state from which it is operating. Since there are 50 states (51 if you count DC). that's lots of separate local mechanisms and their requirements vary a lot. Some states in effect are accreditors, while other states only have token requirements. California is somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.

(Making it even more complicated, there almost always are exemptions to the requirements, usually for religious schools. These can do pretty much anything they want. But that problem doesn't apply in Heritage's case.)

Since it's comparatively easy to open a higher education institution in the US, and since the state approval and licensing mechanisms aren't always reliable, there needs to be some means to distinguish the credible schools from the ones that are substandard. So the US has evolved private quality-assurance organizations called "accreditors". These send out teams to examine schools and publish lists of schools that pass their inspections.

The typical form of accreditation in the United States is called 'regional accreditation'. Probably all of the American universities that most people have heard of are regionally accredited. That includes every state university, every research university and everything ranging from the ivy league to the community colleges. The regional accreditors accredit entire institutions that might offer many programs in many different fields.

There are also specialized forms of accreditation that apply to particular academic or professional fields. AACSB accredits business programs, the AMA accredits medical schools, ABET accredits engineering programs, the ABA accredits law schools. There are lots of these special-purpose accreditors. The specialized accreditors typically are operated the national professional organizations in a particular field. Obtaining these accreditations represents additional evidence that a school operates a credible program in a particular specialty. In many cases specialized accreditations are critically important for licensing purposes here in the US and many state licensing boards demand them. In most cases these additional specialized accreditations are obtained by universities that are already regionally accredited. (There are a few stand-alone specialized schools that only have specialized accreditation.)

Things are complicated a little by what Degreeinfo calls "national accreditors". I don't like that term since people outside the US will naturally assume that national is superior to regional, but in this case that isn't true. There are several accreditors that began as specialized accreditors such as DETC (originally for home-study correspondence courses) and ACICS (originally for vocational business-skills colleges) that are trying to become general institutional accreditors like the regional accreditors. There's no real reason why they can't do that if they want to, but so far their rosters are dominated by small obscure institutions without significant scholarly or professional reputations. These new would-be full-service accreditors don't always receive the broad recognition that the regional accreditors receive. That day may come, but it's still a ways off.

OK, that's the general situation in the United States.

Let's look at the possibilities.

The best would be regional accreditation (in this case WASC) and professional accreditations, in this case ABA and AACSB. Heritage doesn't have that.

Next best would be regional accreditation alone. Heritage doesn't have that.

Next best would be DETC or ACICS accreditation (or something similar). Heritage doesn't have that either.

Next best would be state approval by a reasonably strong state. That might be arguable if Heritage was truly California approved, but it isn't. By it's own admission it just has a temporary approval to operate. My impression is that the BPPVE's backlog has reached serious proportions. Applications were sitting on desks for months on end and schools were complaining about all their lost revenue. So the BPPVE has cleared their desks by letting new schools operate temporarily without full inspection pending the office getting around to them. That opens the door to some pretty doubtful things operating for a time, so I wouldn't place much trust on temporary approval. (I really wish the BPPVE search listings would specify the schools with temporary approvals or religious exemptions.)

Bottom line, Heritage may provide valuable education to its students, but it's hard to be certain of that. It is definitely unaccredited and it doesn't have any reputation that I can see, so its degrees might not be widely accepted by employers and professionals.

Personally I'd prefer to look for something a little higher on the food-chain.

 

My memory serves me well. A look at appendix c.16 of the DETC 2005 Accreditation Handbook shows that a DETC institution is eligible to participate in the doctoral pilot project ONLY if the institution has been DETC accredited for at least two years.

Heritage would have to drop its doctoral programs in order to achieve initial DETC accreditation.

 

Heritage University, for a new school and only State approved in California, is very expensive in my books.

Something like around 20K for the DBA...Ouch!!!

 

Taft University, which is DETC accredited, gets only $225.00 per semester hour for its J.D., LL.M., and business degrees.

 

Expensive Risk.

Why pay 20K for unaccredited degree?

Learner

 

But it is only temporary approval. Bill Dayson's post addresses this quite well.
And wasn't the University of Berkley temporarily approved?


Dan

 

This is one of the reasons I think
approval process for Calif. DL
schools is a joke. BPPVE seems to
forget California has a vast history of DL
fraud. Now things have improved
but this kind of temporary sloppiness
is enough to get a few people
to experience the less than wonderful
side of life. I want to like CA approved
DL schools but common sense tells me
not to.

Dan

 

Thank you very much for your detailed analysis.

However, if the university is state approved, does it mean the government of the state will accept the graduates of this university for applying gov't jobs? If not, what is the value of a stated approved university? It seems no value at all even if the state itself does not accept the graduates!

 

Unaccredited state-approved engineering degrees

Unaccredited, but state-approved, degrees are typically accepted for general use within that state, including government employment. But it is possible for for a legal, state-approved academic degree to be rejected by the government of that state in certain circumstances.

For example, Kennedy-Western University and Pensacola Christian College are well-known unaccredited institutions that have state approval to operate in Wyoming and Florida, respectively. Both schools issue legal, but unaccredited, engineering degrees.

But neither the Wyoming Board of Registration for Professional Engineers and Professional Land Surveyors nor the Florida Board of Professional Engineers will accept degrees from these schools for purposes of professional licensure. The Wyoming Board only accepts engineering degrees that are ABET-accredited or equivalent, a standard that KW doesn't meet. The Florida Board explicitly rejected PCC engineering degrees in a board meeting in 2003.