Hello all: I am curious about Greenwich University. They say that their main campus/degree granting authority is Australia, but they have a branch campus in Hawaii. I am unsure as to its compliance with GAAP. Any comments? their website is at www.greenwich.edu
Greenwich does not meet GAAP criteria! GU is located on Norfolk Island, off the coast of Australia. The school is not approved/accredited/sanctioned/licensed/etc., by the Australian Dept. of Education.
Darren, if you are really interested in Greenwich, I would suggest using the newly functional 'search' feature. There has been a tremendous amount of discussion here in the past concerning Greenwich. Dozens of threads and hundreds of posts. "GAAP" is not a form of international accreditation. It is just a shorthand way of saying that a school appears in one of the reference books that university admissions officers often consult. To the best of my knowledge, Greenwich does not. I doubt if Greenwich or its degrees would find much acceptance from professional peers. In my opinion, Greenwich might be similar to a California-approved advanced degree program, except that CA-approval makes it possible to take some professional licensing examinations in California while Greenwich doesn't. It would also be similar to going to a library and starting your own reading program in whatever interests you, for that matter. The advantage with Greenwich is that it would give you some structure, and perhaps put you in touch with mentors who might want to help you. Greenwich's most realistic niche is probably providing advanced guided study to people without a primary degree objective and who don't need recognized university credit. If you have an interest in philosophy and would like to converse with a philosopher, Greenwich might set that up for you. Bottom line: I think that Greenwich is a bad choice for an advanced degree. Even worse if you need the degree for some professional purpose.
Let me explain my quandry. I have just been made aware of a medical intuitive named Carolyn Myss. She is well known in the self-help, alternative healing crowd. She has been endorsed by well known, highly credentialed people. The problem is, when I look at her website, her PhD listed is from Greenwich. I believe if you do the work you deserve the benefits of such, and I am definitely one of those who believe that our minds have a great potential to heal, but I think this type of thing takes away from the credibility of anything other than mainstream medicine. I guess this is frustrating because there are no GAAP programs of this nature.....except for those from Maharishi University of Management. Any other comments?
If anyone is interested, her website is www.myss.com . She seems to have done quite well with that degree.
I suspect that just about everything one can do with Greenwich can also be done in a regionally accredited or other GAAP institution. Look at what goes on, for instance, at the California Institute for Integral Studies, New College, JFK University, Saybrook, and so on. And keep in mind that Women Who Run with the Wolves was, in fact, Clarissa Pinkola Estes' doctoral dissertation ("PDE") at the regionally accredited Union Institute. There are certainly people who can benefit from a Greenwich degree. Indeed, during my involvement, 1990-1991, we had several faculty, such as Stanley Krippner, who's "day job" was on the faculty at a regionally accredited school (Saybrook), and who also took on several Greenwich students at a time. Such people typically made use of the "with" approach to presenting themselves, as in "I did my doctoral work with (or 'under the supervision of') Stanley Krippner..." Hey, we even had a student whose "with" was Henry Kissinger. In that particular student's world, doing a political science degree "with" Kissinger probably carried more weight than doing the same degree at the University of Montana, etc. It always comes down to this: will the degree meet your needs, both current and predictable future.
I'll add my two cents here: * Greenwich is a legitimate school which, in its time, offered some pretty impressive, innovative programs. I've spoken to a number of people who earned Ph.D.'s there, and I have no trouble using the word "earned" to describe their experiences. * The current Greenwich does not meet generally accepted accrediting principles, since it's based on a very small island off the coast of Australia, and its application for accreditation was rejected by Australia's gold standard accreditor, the Australian Qualifications Framework. * While I don't agree with Greenwich's "we're accredited" marketing strategy (which strikes me as potentially misleading and unethical to say the least), it is most certainly not, and has never been, a degree mill. Cheers,
(I'd add that I am talking about the Greenwich of Norfolk Island and Hawaii, not the one in the UK, which is royally chartered and does meet generally accepted accrediting principles, but probably does not offer (m)any nonresident degrees.) Cheers,
