How is/was your school?

OK, I don't know if this topic will fly, but I wanted to start a thread in which people can post about the positive and negative aspects of the DL schools they have enrolled in and/or graduated from. I'd like it to be an honest assessment, without unnecessary boasting or defensiveness, that allows us to share our experiences and impressions as DL students and graduates.

 

Uh, I guess I should put in my two cents!

EMPIRE STATE COLLEGE, New York, Master's degree program in Labor and Policy Studies -- I earned my M.A. from this program in 1999, having pursued it first in the early 90s, then dropping out, and finally finishing it.
POSITIVES included a mix of core required courses that gave the program an overall focus and considerable flexibility with independent study; quality of the faculty; residencies; diverse backgrounds of students; and the opportunity to participate in a short study tour of Comparative Public Policy in England. I also appreciated being able to "go back to school" at a time when I was becoming intellectually mature enough to relate interests developed as a practicing attorney to emerging academic interests in labor law & policy.

NEGATIVES included the inherent isolation of DL study & too infrequent contact with faculty and students (it was easy to become a "lone wolf" in between residencies); concommitant lack of feeling part of an educational community.

***

WESTERN INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, Berkeley, Ph.D. Program in Higher Education and Social Change -- I enrolled in this program in August 2000. Most of WISR's students are from the Bay Area, but they will work with students from other regions of the country and abroad. It is state-approved but too small to apply for RA.

POSITIVES include the accessibility and intellectual level of the faculty; considerable freedom in designing a course of study; an eclectic group of students; express commitment of the institution to positive social change, without being overly ideological; an encouraging attitude towards innovative projects.

NEGATIVES include the lack of regional accreditation (not a critical problem in my case, but could be for many others); my lack of geographic proximity to Berkeley (Boston is about as far away as one can get and still be in the U.S.!), which means that I miss many of the residential seminars and programs.

 

What a wonderful idea for a topic!

UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK/REGENTS COLLEGE (now EXCELSIOR COLLEGE), Albany, B.A. in Liberal Arts with concentrations in literature and psychology -- I completed my bachelor's here in June 1996 after about 15 months of enrollment, completing the vast majority of my requirements before I actually signed on board. 114 hours of credit came from various credit-by-examination schemes, and the other 9 hours through three correspondence courses (two from Ole Miss, one from Penn State).

POSITIVES included cost, flexibility, speed, regional accreditation, and broad range of possible credit sources.

NEGATIVES included a somewhat non-intuitive method of awarding credit that was not clearly laid out in the pre-enrollment information packet (I seem to remember DANTES Here's to Your Health counting towards my humanities credit requirements), the fact that Regents later split from USNY and went private, the fact that Regents later changed its name to Excelsior College, and the fact that Regents/Excelsior now apparently includes a letter with each transcript explaining how flexible and nontraditional they are, which probably won't jive with the homies in Australia.

* * *

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, DOMINGUEZ HILLS (Humanities External Degree (HUX) Program), Carson, M.A. in humanities -- I completed my master's here last December after three years of enrollment (Fall 1997 - Fall 2000). I earned 43 semester hours of credit, wrote a thesis entitled "Your Brother's Blood: An Interdisciplinary Commentary on Genesis 4:1-16," and graduated with a GPA that hovers, I think, somewhere around 3.75.

POSITIVES -- A very solid and entertaining curriculum; a very qualified faculty; mostly logical program requirements; the ability to design one's own courses (though I didn't take advantage of this option); regional accreditation; an extremely pleasant staff (hi, Nicole!); a reading-intensive curriculum.

NEGATIVES -- A little slow going; a lengthy thesis approval process; occasionally ornery faculty members (but isn't that true everywhere?); virtually no student community (the only online CSUDH boards I've found are populated by compulsive whiners who sound unprepared for graduate work), which intensifies the "lone wolf" experience.

For more details on just what I did in the HUX program, click here.


Peace,

------------------
Tom Head
www.tomhead.net

 

I earned an A.A.S. from CIE in the early '80s.
Positives:
Wonderfully well worked out lessons, good hands-on lab work. Excellent instructor support. Very well accepted in industry.
Negatives:
Not ABET accredited so not good toward resident BSET. Also doesn't count toward F.E. exam.

 

B.S.-Regents College(aka USNY, aka Excelsior)

Positive: I completed a degree there. I was able to transfer in courses from all over the place in order to finish my bachelor's in business. They made it fairly easy to get all my credits in one place as I had taken courses everywhere in the military.

Negative: I never once talked to anyone there. I just filled out the app, sent transcripts, sent money, and got a diploma.

MBA-California State Univ-Dominguez Hills

Positive: I had some great teachers there who took time to respond and guide me. I had a lot of interaction with others via e-mail, discussion groups, project groups, and personal get togethers. I found students who lived within a 2 hour drive and met them personally a number of times. I enjoyed the program and did not feel like a lone wolf.

Negative: You had better plan your classes correctly if you want to graduate in the amount of time they say you can. Also, it was extremely exhausting going from one term to the next with only a day or two break between terms. Assignments were due on Monday and that made Sunday anything but a day of rest. I often found that foreign students were not well equipped with English skills in order to do a good job on the teams. They sort of floated along like flotsam and jetsam and were left them behind.
Also, the school admitted, at that time, students who did not have a strong enough business background.

Bing

 

I think that this is a tremendous topic, and I will be very interested to read about other people's experiences with their various schools. Hopefully a lot of people will respond.

As for me, I graduated with an MA from CSUDH external humanities program, May 2000. I did a thesis on John of Damascus' 'Three Apologies Against Those Who Attack The Divine Images'. While Tom Head has already said a lot about CSUDH-HUX, I'll add:

STRENGTHS: A faculty that is competent and approachable. Several were specialists in areas of personal interest to me, including William Hagan, an all-around great guy, very supportive and my unofficial advisor, Doctor of Sacred Theology from Georgetown, Arthur Harshman, art historian, Ph.D. from the U. of Chicago, and James Jeffers, a part-timer who splits his time between CSUDH and Biola U., historian specializing in late antiquity, and author of several books on early Christianity in its late Roman context.

I appreciated the program's willingness to let me follow my interests across disciplinary boundaries, veering crazily through history, art history, philosophy and Byzantine theology. In other courses I ranged from Edward Conze on early Buddhism to chaos theory's implications for free will and determinism. That may not be considered the best of academic decorum at a place like Berkeley, but I sure liked it.

I think that many different kinds of students could find a niche in the HUX program. Because the program has grown so large, it has pulled in a whole corps of adjuncts from around the LA basin, many of whom teach at other universities as well as CSUDH. The program has people with interests in a tremendously wide variety of areas. Modern art theory, military history, the French revolution, you name it.

WEAKNESSES: Paradoxically, the same thing as the strengths. The fact that the program allows one to range so widely in terms of breadth kind of precludes achieving the same depth that a more focused masters would reach.

If one expects to duplicate a masters in philosophy for example, he or she would find nothing offered in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, logic, individual philosophers (except Rousseau and new Plato and Aristotle courses that are being rolled out) or topical things like philosophy of language or philosophy of science. For that reason the CSUDH program, even with a specialization in philosophy, is probably a poor preparation for a doctorate in philosophy.

But that is really just a recognition of what the HUX program is: an interdisciplinary humanities program. You get what you pay for.

Weaknesses in mechanics include an antiquated correspondence format, not enough interaction with faculty and no interaction at all with other students. In a weird sort of way, I kind of liked that fact, since the whole thing was just me and the professor in an almost tutorial format. But there is an extreme "lone ranger" aspect to it.

The HUX office was always very nice and unfailingly helpful. But their thesis approval process took forever and definitely needs work. As things stand there is no way that anyone could complete this 30-unit program in a year. Two is more like it.

 

Community College of the Air Force
A.A.S. (Education Administration and Methodology), 1981

Strengths: Translates Air Force technical training into college credit, then combines it with general education into an associate's degree. Accepts a limited amount of nontraditional credits from other sources. Can be completed wherever one is stationed. Regionally accredited (SACS).

Weaknesses: It's an associate's degree-only school. A.A.S. graduates do not tranfer readily to 4-year schools. Major limited to one's Air Force Specialy(ies).


University of the State of New York, Regents External Degree Program
A.A. (Liberal Arts), 1979
B.S. (Business), 1980
B.A. (Liberal Arts/Sociology), 1981

Strengths: A credit is a credit is a credit (mostly). Doesn't matter where you learned it, you earned it. Great flexibility. Low cost. NOT NAMED "REGENTS" OR "EXCELSIOR"! No residency. Regional accreditation. I've never had the degree not accepted for anything.

Weaknesses: Transferring credit can be a hassle sometimes. Business degree not AACSB-accredited, making acceptance to AACSB-accredited MBA programs somewhat harder. Stoopid new name.


National University
MBA, 1985

Strengths: Take one class every calendar month. Teachers are working professionals in their fields. Great flexibility in scheduling. Plethora of programs. Now offers 100% distance programs. Regional accreditation. Reasonable costs.

Weaknesses: Faced bankruptcy and had accreditation put on probation in 80's. No doctoral programs (still!?). Despite being the second largest private university, and the model for many other schools (Strayer, Phoenix), not well-known outside (or inside?) California.


The Union Institute
Ph.D. learner until 1994.

Strengths: Terrific flexibility. Good opportunity to work with experts in one's field. Experienced learners can really get through their competencies and concentrate on their dissertations (PDEs). Creativity abounds. Good community of scholars.

Weaknesses: Lack of guidance to learners (back then, but which no doubt has improved tremendously since I was there). Expensive.


Monterrey Institute for Graduate Studies
Please. Enough already!

Rich Douglas

 

These are great responses. I'd be interested in hearing from folks who enrolled at other schools, inc. Fielding, Walden, Capella, as well as non-RA schools like Cal Coast, Columbia Pacific, and Greenwich.