Hello All, Most of the moderators on the DLDF - Accredited vs State-Approved vs Unaccredited Forum knew me a year and a half ago as a gentleman about to head off to St. Regis University and spend $2000 for a bachelor's, master's, and doctorial degree. I'd like to do a partial report on my non-traditional education having not followed St. Regis' path to destruction and having completed an associate's in computer information management at Ashworth College. First, I'll begin by stating that Saint Regis University is a "bad" idea. I will discuss St. Regis for the next few paragraphs, for information on Ashworth skip to the bottom. If I had a couple grand lying around that I wasn't eating or living under, I might use them just to see what the response in my personal, educational, and employment lives might be. When I was investigating St. Regis, I was first a little defensive to have been considering them with so much DegreeInfo style "advice" on the matter. I got a little more than defensive and so I tried tested St. Regis. I pulled every scrap of paper from my closet (this was before purchasing some of John Bear's books, BTW) and made what seemed to me at the time a convincing case that I had learned enough to warrant a higher education degree. I included contact names and phone numbers of people who could vouch for my skills. I included every skill that was even slightly worthwhile. The life experience summary turned out to be 27 pages or so with Times 10 point font. I told the evaluator that I didn't know what my experience was worth and I was offered a bachelor's and a master's combo with an option to tack on a doctorate with some coursework and tests. I told the evaluator (Father Pat, if I remember his name) that I needed to think about it. I then created an online personality using a hacker credit card number generator (worthless thing) and some investigative research on housing projects in Kansas. (I live in Alabama.) I then endowed this personality with some completely fictitious work and life experience. The quality of the experience and the time spent in life-learning did not come close to my own amount of experience and time spent in life-learning. I submitted a simple resume for this personality. I did not submit a life-experience portfolio or any supporting documentation. This personality was awarded a bachelor’s/master’s/doctorial combo with no additional coursework. This disparagement indicates to me that St. Regis is preying on the fears and weaknesses of the American lower-middle class. My personal learning-portfolio included skills learned at high responsibility jobs with Fortune 500 companies and knowledge gained by pretty good employee training programs. The fictitious learning-portfolio included only very basic task-oriented skills such as would be gained in entry-level, low responsibility bank teller or customer service representative positions. This also indicates to me that St. Regis does not want to provide upper-level degrees to people who might work in the “spot-light” so to speak. They are therefore most willing to provide upper-level degrees to people who might use the degree in less-public arenas. This indicates that on a cultural-level the St. Regis organization “knows” that it does not want attention of mainstream employers or academics. Therefore, for anyone looking into St. Regis, here are my suggestions: 1. Have at least a bachelor’s degree from an accredited (DETC or REGIONAL) institution. 2. Have between $1400 and $2000 in “disposable income” depending on what options you are buying. 3. Be willing to drop a St. Regis degree from your CV/Resume at any time. 4. Be able to defend a degree from a college located in a developing nation but run from the Dominican Republic. 5. Have a pretty stable job prior to St. Regis. St. Regis will not dramatically improve your chances of success unless you are a good salesman and can make just about anyone believe just about anything. 6. Just don’t consider them. Here are the primary problems with a St. Regis University diploma: 1. Liberia has had 10 years of very bloody civil war. This was followed by a dictator-like regime. 2. If the Taylor regime is overthrown, St. Regis may loose government support. 3. A degree from an unaccredited and/or unauthorized school may be considered worthless by some members of academia and business. 4. No learning occurs under the life-experience educational model. The school simply validates a current body of knowledge. 5. Not one of my references was contacted to verify the information in my 27 page life-experience summary. This indicates that St. Regis would accept my word at face value and offer a degree based upon on-line contact alone. 6. At the time I applied, the school did not offer any mechanism for determining the validity of any of my statements. St. Regis currently offers two methods for applying to their program; taking on-line, open book tests and the life-experience dissertation. 7. According to John Bear in Bear’s Guide (15) the add-on option “apostille” recommended by St. Regis for U.S. citizens is not really what St. Regis purports it to be. This indicates a small misleading element in the St. Regis University sales program. Now as far as Ashworth College goes: I enjoyed my course of study. I enjoyed the leisurely pace at which my studies progressed and the control I was able to exercise over the pace of learning. I enjoyed having formalized training on many of the topics I had had previous experience with in my employment. I think that the correspondence model is an excellent method for a working adult to gain education. The Ashworth implementation will only work effectively if the following is true: A. The consumer is disciplined enough to study on a regular/semi-regular basis B. The consumer has good analytical/critical thinking skills and can therefore pose questions and reason out answers to those questions with practically no assistance from the school. C. The consumer has some previous knowledge of the topic being studied. My own experience with introductory accounting (which I had no previous education or practical experience with) leads me to suggest that unless I personally have some kind of limitation when it comes to accounting, the average middle-aged student in a non-accounting field might have problems passing this class. These requirements as I see them would be the same using any distance learning method and any implementation of the model. While I can not say that I personally was particularly challenged by the series, I can see how someone who perhaps did not finish high school or someone who hasn’t been to college in 20 or 30 years would be challenged by the program. It may be that the program was designed for an 18 to 20 year old and that because I am substantially older than that the program was fairly easy to navigate. Many of the required courses were in basic math and reading/writing skills which for some might be a problem. The hardest two courses for me were the Introduction to Database Processing (a database analysis and design course) and the Introduction to Accounting courses. The semester exams are similar to the achievement exams given for each lesson in a course. While quite a few of the semester exam questions deal with memorized information (i.e. straight out of the book with no synthesis) the bulk of the questions require at least partial synthesis (interpretation, analysis, and application) to answer correctly. This indicates to me a higher level of competency requirement than I had initially expected of a DETC college. In this, I am proud of Ashworth College. There are two primary weaknesses of the Ashworth implementation of distance learning (they each deal with customer service issues): The first weakness is the lag time between finishing a course, receiving the final grade, and receiving the next course to begin work on. The average time between course completion (i.e. the emailed course completion report) and the next course arriving was between two and three weeks for me. While this is not too much of a problem, it could be construed as a method for making a program appear to take longer than it does. In my case the final course took close to 2 months to arrive (it was backordered). Without this factored in, the average time in transit after course completion becomes closer to 1 week. The second weakness is the lack of communication with students by phone. Email is by far the best method of communication between students and Ashworth. I did find a few cases in which emails would get lost. I began CC’ing myself, the registrar office, and the education department. This cut down dramatically on “lost” emails. To contact Ashworth by phone has taken me as long as 40 minutes to be connected to get through to an operator. If you have an education related question you’ll be transferred to the education department. Of the four times I’ve specifically requested the education department (to the best of my recollection) the following is the resulting breakdown: In one of the four, the operator was able to answer an education related question without involving the education department. In one of the four, I spoke with a live person in the education department. In one of the four, I left a message and later received a call-back. In one of the four, I left a message and did not get a response.
DL Part Two Each time I’ve called during normal business hours (I think they are on a standard M-F 8-5 EST schedule), I have eventually gotten through to a live operator and been at the least pleased with the customer service at the front-line operator level. About 6 months ago some phone changes were made which increased the speed of reaching an operator. They do have a reporting system imbedded in the holding message which counts the time until an operator is available. I believe the average time on hold is now between 6 and 10 minutes. Prior to the change I would regularly get 21 to 31 minute holding times. Not having too much personal experience with distance learning methods at this stage (I’m currently attending WGU, so give me a few months and you’ll get a report on them too), I recommend Ashworth College. The people most likely to benefit from an Ashworth program are very self-motivated, have been in the work-force for quite some time (and therefore have at least minimal skill in several of the areas covered by the Ashworth program they pursue), and have little or no post-secondary educational background. The transferring and CLEP process at Ashworth is remarkably simple. You simply fill-out a form listing the courses you believe you qualify to transfer listing the school they are to be transferred from. The education department makes the decision within days and mails you confirmation immediately. You then fill-out a form listing the courses you would like to test out of and where you gained the knowledge from. The education department then mails to your proctor tests for each course you listed. The grading and response time on these tests is fairly short (within days). The semester exam testing process requires a proctor to ensure that four or five of my buddies don’t work together to help me pass. The proctor also ensures that the allotted time for each exam is not exceeded. These tests are open book and are therefore not terribly difficult to pass. Like I said above, the bulk of the questions on Ashworth semester exams appear to be synthesis-type questions. This adds challenge to the course. Additionally, in the computer information management program at least, to complete each course many of Ashworth’s courses require submission of real-life/life-imitating projects, schematic diagrams, developed applications, JavaScript enabled websites (on CD or floppy), and other projects. These projects are well thought out, require an understanding of many components of the topic at hand, and the instructors are picky about accepting the results. I think that’s all I have to report for now. I’ll report back later about WGU. Hope this information is useful to someone. Jacob LEGAL: This document is in the public domain and may be used in any way you see fit. You can print it and burn it. You can print it and submit it to your college as evidence in a study of non-traditional learning experiences. You can quote from it and dispute it point by point. You can even ignore it if you wish. Portions of this document may be reused in stories I'll tell my family, my children and my children's children. When I get to the doctorial level I may use portions of this document in a thesis. I am in no way affiliated with Saint Regis University, Ashworth College, or Western Governer's University except as specifically stated in this document. APOLOGETICS (look it up, it's a word use - GOOGLE "define:Apologetics"): Please forgive any spelling, construction, or other gramattical errors. These errors are mine and belong to me. Thanks.
