Urgent Advice Needed

Below is an email I received from Dr. Larry Tremblay of Louisiana

"Louisiana law requires that academic degree-granting institutions operating in Louisiana be licensed. That same law exempts from state oversight institutions offering only religious degrees in Louisiana. Fairfax claimed to be domiciled somewhere in England and only offered religious degrees in Louisiana. Therefore, it was exempt from licensure. At my request, a staff member visited the physical address of Fairfax in Baton Rouge. The location was vacant.

Sorry I can not be of more help"

Advice needed as to what I shoud do next? I really wanting to sue the Fairfax University.

Feed back please,

Thanks

Migara

 

Sue them for what?

 

Perhaps because Migara didn't take good advice given here last year???


http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=110182

 

Hi Migara:

I'm sorry for your bad experience with the dubious and now likely dead Fairfax. My guess is that you are out your money. It may not make you happy to hear this, but I suspect you will have to regard this as a learning experience, although not the kind you paid for.

Bill and Nosborne make good points in short compass. Heed them! Since Nosborne is a wise and experienced lawyer, and a DL student himself into the bargain, I would trust his hunch that a suit would be pointless. Bill is a great and fearless mill- and shill-hunter. His comment holds good for the future: great alertness to red flags--warning signs--must be part of your further DL adventures, so that they don't turn sadly into misadventures.

I do not recall what programme you were in at Fairfax or what work you may have done thus far toward a degree (sic) from that outfit. It seems to me that the most constructive question for you now is how to salvage what work you have done so far and apply it [the credits unlikely, the knowledge probably] to a degree programme (if possible) at a new and fully adequate school.

If you care to supply some details on that, perhaps some of us can be of help.

You can also PM me if you want, but a public discussion will get you a better range of advice and might also be of help to someone else.

Best wishes to you,
Janko the Mad Priest

 

Cause

Hi M, What do you think you can sue them for? You have a Religous degree, I think this is buyer's remorse. Anyone? Yours Truly, Nikolas Horthy

 

I just read the linked thread (thanks Bill) in which Migara was resolute in his conviction that Fairfax was a good school. Now he wants to sue them. Putting aside the other issues, I'd just like to know what happened? Why did you change your mind Migara?
Jack

 

I'm in Christchurch next week - would be good to meet and discuss, if you are prepared to travel from Auckland. Then hiring a car and driving to Queenstown. I'm happy to meet and and you can shout me one of those Kiwi beers if you like.

Cheers,

George

 

Hello all,


nosborne48: I would like to sue them for: Negligence, failure to provide education as per the state regulations, theft, financial mismanagement, dubious operation of an education institution and Deception, etc, etc.

Bill: I take your point, but how can you not think, that when Lord Perry took over the Chancellor of the university, and direction they were heading. Yes i thought it was a better DL unaccredited schools that were around. Besides, in the university's faculty page, they only had one professor with a Fairfax Phd.

uncle janko: many thank for the words of Encouragement and advice. I applied for a BA in Management studies, Masters and Phd. I paid around US $ 17,100.00. I have completed my BA and completed the Masters, but still have received my diplomas. i have thus far have research around 284 New Zealand and Aussie companies that are listed in NZ stock exhange as part of my PhD, which i am focusing on Dividend determinants and influencing factors for Dividend decisions in NZ. The study covers a period from 1997 to 2003.
Now i am looking to see what else i can do....

Greetings George Brown; I would love to meet you in person and shout kiwi beers and some world class wines, but sadly i am in auckland and mostly it is kind of short notice, hence unable to take time off from work. please let me if you travelling to Auckland.

Thank you all

Migara

 

Unfortunately for you there is probably nothing left to sue Fairfax for. Furthermore, the fact that you had actual knowledge of what the institution was all about (As referenced in the thread Bill provided a link to) would prevent you from claiming that you were misled. Finally, I am sorry to hear that you spend all that money and did all the work (I am sure you work very hard for your degrees) and at the end got nothing in return.

Good luck and I sincerely hope you never have to face this type of situation again.

 

Oddly enough this may be a good thing. Now you can get a real accredited degree instead of going through life with a junk degree. At least you found out early. Good luck.

 

Yes, it is a good thing on one hand, then again 17,000.00 US $, just gone down the toilet!!! thats hard to swallow.....

Is it true in reality, that i cant do anything to Fairfax? I am sure that i am not the only one in this boat......

Surely, authorities can do something?


Migara

 

You may have to ask them. Fairfax did deliver on BA & MA so money due is likely much lower.

 

No Realistic Recourse

There is no realistic recourse for Migara against Fairfax and its proprietors. It is a really expensive lesson and I hope that the financial damage doesn't impact your quest to further your education.

At this point, there is probably very little that U.S. authorities can do (since the "school" is already defunct) and it's doubtful that you would actually see the results of any lawsuit translate into money in your pocket. This is a perfect example of why the real experts in DL counsel prospective students to stick with RA (and foreign-equivalent) schools and avoid the unaccredited (and barely legal/illegal) schools. You may want to pose your original question to the great advocates of unaccredited education at "the other board." See what counsel JJay, Dennis Ruhl, fellow New Zealander Dr. Neil Hayes QSM, et al. can offer you. They incessantly bash and disparage certain RA schools, but then again, no RA schools are being accused of ripping off students and leaving them with non-transferrable credits.

 

Cheers guys.

No i till have not received my Diploma's for BA and MA. i typed incorrectly on my last post.

Migara

 

I can not believe I am about to sugest this. Maybe, if you have your credit transcripts, you may be able to transfer those units to another unacredited school and get your "degrees" there. Just make sure the school is either approved, authorized, or licensed by a state. Alabama, Utah, California among others have some sub-standard schools were you can get your crappy degree and be happy with it. Just make sure that you don't claim the "degree" as accredited. It is so sad when a person ignores every piece of advice offered to them because they desperatelly wanted to believe a degree mill is legal.

 

Hmmmm....

Let's see, you started enquiring about this school early last year, have already completed the BA and Masters degrees and say you truly believed they were a reputable, albeit unaccredited, school? This one could fail the common sense test...

 

Re: Hmmmm....

Had a young Indian contractor working in my company last year. He was doing Mercury Tool backend. He had told me he was applying for a job that needed a EE degree. He had a CS degree.

So, he started looking around. He found some mill that not only awarded him a EE degree, based on his life experience in a field he never worked in, but they offered him a bonus of an MBA if he paid another $600. They said that he had so much experience "managing" that he could get the MBA. He ended up getting a higher paying job at IBM, out in Vermont or New Hampshire.

Do companies just not care about the bogusness of a degree anymore? Or is it just that the cheapest whatever will prevail? Maybe no one cares to even check. I knew of one man at my company that had a bogus degree. He since left, though...or maybe he was invited to leave. I don't know.

 

Talk to your lawyer TODAY!

I would not want to say whether there's a cause of action or not.

IF you can locate a potential defendant with sufficient assets to warrant suing AND you can identify the right forum in which to sue, it might be worth it. $17,000 is a lot of money.

But this isn't going to be a simple DIY lawsuit; there are some rather subtle issues concerning notice and reliance and frankly, your posts here may well end up as evidence against you of your own state of mind when you entered into the contract. Jurisdiction, a highly technical area of law, will likely also come up.

Bottom line advice? You should not make this decision without consulting counsel. It's going to cost you, maybe even a couple hundred of dollars, for a legal opinion. But NO ONE here can advise you competently under these circumstances. Your lawyer will have to interview you in detail and examine closely every scrap of paper involved.

Do NOT rely on your own judgment or your own efforts! This is not that kind of lawsuit!

 

Good catch.

I guess some people want to play the ignorance card when it suits them. There was ample warnings about Fairfax and Migara chose to ignore them.