SA degree acceptance at a state university

I will be finishing my PHD from a Baptist Seminary soon. The degree is fully accredited (regionally and ATS). As part of my PHD work, I am also working on am MA in Islamic Studies through UNISA.

I have received a scholarship to work on a second PHD (I know, I am a glutton for academia!) at a state school. The scholarship is not from the school but from a private donor who has stipulated any state school that I want to go to is fine. While my acceptance into the state school will be greatly enhanced by having the first PHD in the field of study (theology with a dissertation Islamic studies), I am concerned about their acceptance of the MA from UNISA.

I have posted several questions in other threads concerning UNISA's accreditation and its equivalence to RA accreditation. I have read through many websites and I think I understand that, for the most part, UNISA's government authorization is equivalent to RA accreditation.

I am thinking about this wrong? Would a state university pretty much accept the UNISA degree based upon the fact the government has granted degree granting authority to UNISA? I also understand that the acceptance of degrees is based upon the institution itself and is not guaranteed merely because it is RA.

Do I need to worry about the MA from UNISA or do you think I will be fine? Thanks for any advice/insight/wisdom!

 

I cannot answer your questions but I commend you and admire your tenacity and scholastic endeavors.

You are my new hero! Sorry Carl...DesElms...Nosborne.

 

I have no idea, except to say that UNISA is internationally recognized so I should think there'd be no problem.

However, you MIGHT run into a different problem...I have seen where the University of California (Berkeley, in fact) won't admit as a Ph.D. student anyone who already holds a dissertation doctorate. Apparently, one doctorate is enough!

 

I have, in the past around here, referred to UNISA as being accredited by its government -- which government's accreditation has the respect of the US Department of Education as generally equivalent to US regional accreditation -- and, therefore, degrees therefrom should be considered on-par with those that are US regionally-accredited. But a member here -- and he knows who he is -- who is very, very familiar with South African accreditaiton situation has shot down what I said... but he does so cryptically. He says I'm wrong, but he won't say why; and he won't, considering that, offer-up what is the correct (or at least more technically accurate) information, despite my repeated attempts to get him to do so. (See also here and here and here and here and here.)

So, absent his input here -- and, frankly, as a way of trying to get him to chime-in, once and for all and educate us as to the South African accreditation situation and his reasons why we can't consider UNISA to be accredited in approximately the same way that we mean that sort of thing here in the US -- I'm going to say, yet again, that a degree from UNISA should be considered "accredited" in the way in which we, here in the US, all mean that word whenever we use it. Therefore, any US college or university should (and the operative word, here, is "should") accept a UNISA degree on its face as equivalent to a similarly-named/designated degree earned at a US regionally-accredited insitution.

However, you really shouldn't rely on that. Instead, you should contact the school that you're hoping will accept your UNISA degree and find out what foreign credential evaluator it trusts to declare foreign degrees RA equivalent (or not); then go pay said evaluator the anywhere from $100 to usually not more than $500 it charges to evaluate your UNISA degree and declare it either equivalent to a US regionally-accredited one or not. The legit, most commonly-used foreign credential evaluators are either AACRAO, or pretty much any NACES member agency. But you really need to find out which of those the school in which you're interested uses for foreign credential evaluations.

Each institution decides what it will accept or reject, and the sole fact that a proffered credential is regionally accredited may or may not be enough. It just depends on the RA school. That said, one of the whole points of RA is the transferability. So it's unusual for one RA school to reject the coursework of another... at least not without some pretty compelling reasons. What is more common is RA schools rejecting NA (nationally-accredited) degrees and/or coursework. While more and more RA schools are accepting NA credits/credentials, there's still a huge amount of RA registrars looking down their noses at NA coursework and/or degrees. With any luck, that situation will improve as time goes on.

But this whole NA-being-rejected-by-RA thing could be a problem -- well... more a point of confusion, I suppose, than anyting else -- for getting an RA school to accept your UNISA degree. Though UNISA is in South Africa, it's accredited by a US accreditor: DETC, which is a national (and not a regional) accreditor. You'll need to be careful, therefore, that the registrar at the RA school to which you're applying doesn't see the NA accreditation and judge based solely on that, without also considering that even without DETC accreditation, UNISA's South African governmental accreditation probably makes its degrees RA equivalent in any case.

You'll most definitely be fine, I'd say... but you may have to do a little work to get the RA institution to which you're applying to understand all the ins and outs of it before you finally are.

 

Thanks everyone for the information. I most definitely appreciate it!