Regionally Accredited Degree/Diploma Mill ???

Does such an oxymoronic monster exist?

Can an institution be RA and a degree/diploma mill at the same time?

Let the battle begin!!!!!!!!!!!

 

see Webster- McDonald's

Yes...absolutely.....in my opinion.

See Webster.

 

I have a friend who graduated with a M Ed from Western MI university and said it was a joke. A lot of coaches and teachers who were very busy so the prof just coasted. My friend did not think the prof even read his poject.

Robert

 

One of the stories that made the rounds about Bill Cosby's EdD was that it may not have been the *full* EdD experience. I do not know whether or that was the case or not.

North

 

I think that many traditional RA undergraduate programs fit this bill. The movement towards vocational training (as opposed to scholastic education) has compounded the problem, IMHO.

Cheers,
Tony Maranto

 

If RA degree/diploma mills do indeed exist, then the issue becomes very subjective. Perhaps an American College Ph.D. for $199 isn't so bad after all.

 

With over 1500 universities and colleges in the US (see Web U.S. Universities, by State they cannot all be of equal rigor. And with each persons abilities and capabilities being different, it becomes reasonable that what one person finds difficult another might coast through. Also taking in to account the abilities of each person teaching there will be significant variation.

A good example is the current "discussion" on a Midwestern college.

I believe that I would find an introductory plasma physics class at Stanford exceedingly challenging (no experience or study in that area), and yet I am hoping to find a doctoral program in engineering/construction management fairly easy (30 years experience on a daily basis).

Conclusion: Yes, there are RA "diploma mills" - BUT it is relative! If you find a program too easy, you aimed too low!

 

I'm still trying to figure out the point of this thread.

Is it an attempt to start a real discussion about how 'degree mill' is defined? Is it a overly obscure assertion that accreditation is of little value in protecting us against degreemills? Or what exactly?

My response to Russell is to tell him that if he has any ideas of his own about accreditation and degree mills, maybe now is the time for him to post them.

But if this is just some shit-stirring, intended to provoke us into attacking each others schools and labeling them as inferior, my question is: Why?

 

Re: Re: Regionally Accredited Degree/Diploma Mill ???

This is a good question, Bill. I am somewhat disappointed that you would think I was only trying to provoke "us" into attacking each other's schools. The issue of "RA degree mills" has been alluded to in time past, so its nothing new.

As to my own ideas, here is a brief synopsis:

1. Each of my three degrees is RA.

2. If at all possible one should pursue a RA/GAAP degree.

3. Not all unaccredited schools are degree mills, and there are scenario's in which an unaccredited degree may be beneficial, helpful and meet one's objective. This, of course, speaks of a solid substantive program, and most often at the masters or doctoral level, e.g., CA state approved.

4. If one pursues an unaccredited degree one needs to be aware of its limited utility, which has been discussed at length in previous threads.

5. Degree/Diploma mills should be avoided.

Now, to the purpose of my thread:

If RA is the "gold standard" in the US, and if such a thing exists as a RA Degree/Diploma mill, then the whole accreditation system is in serious need of repair. Agreed, some schools have more stringent requirements than others, but RA provides a specific standard that one should be able to expect from such an accredited school.

I don't believe that RA Degree/Diplomas exist, at least if a school digresses to that level it will not remain RA. This is the purpose of my thread. Degree/Diploma mills are those schools where one negotiates a degree for a sum of money, or the requirements are so minimal they are a joke, e.g., a Ph.D. for a 5 page disseration based on life experience.

 

I think the terms "degree mill" and "diploma mill" are tossed about too easily.

What do you mean when you say "degree mill" and ask whether there are RA degree mills?

Are there RA schools that are not as demanding as others? Yes. Getting your first two years of college at Kirkwood Community College will probably be easier than the first two years at Dartmouth.

Are there some that are so undemanding that paying tuition pretty much guarantees graduation? Hm, I kind of doubt that. As you point out, any school that slid so far would lose accreditation. I recall that back in the 70s, Parsons College in Fairfield, Iowa, got a reputation as the place where rich kids went when they flunked out everywhere else. I don't recall if they lost accreditation or closed before that could happen. The campus was purchased by Maharishi International University.

 

And this was my point. A poster comes to the forum (Paul?) calling Webster University a degree mill, therefore, I posed the question--Does such a monster exist?

 

Well, I have referred to some RA institutions as "degree mills." That was a mistake. But I do believe that one can get a degree-mill-quality (DMQ™) degree from many (perhaps most) RA institutions if one seeks and exploits all the available shortcuts, loopholes, gut courses, and so on.

"Every barrel has a bottom to be scraped."

 

Should a person who has an unaccredited PhD be allowed to be called Doctor? Should people who have accredited undergraduate degrees and unaccredited, but state-licensed, graduate degrees, be allowed to advance professionally?

 

I'd say that Russell's monster (RA degree mill) does not exist, but that Gert's axiom (every barrel has a bottom to be scraped) holds true. There are schools that have fallen in quality, that are struggling to survive, that do not serve their students well.

When I hear degree/diploma mill, I think of a school that has been intentionally set up to quickly deliver a substandard (or no-standards) product in order to rake in cash. I envision a couple of guys opening envelopes and laughing as they stack up the checks from suckers. (There's a great scene exactly like this in the beginning of "Hearts of the West" -- a little-known movie that features Jeff Bridges as a gullible farm kid who travels west and finds out that the campus of his writing school is a mailbox at the railroad station.)

As for sticking the DM label on a school with recognized accreditation -- I'd rather hear more specific criticism. *What* about the school doesn't meet the standards you'd expect?

 

Many people consider accredited community colleges to be diploma mills. Also, some consider certain ABA-approved law schools in NY to be degree mills. There are those who hold the opinion that all colleges and universities, that are not Ivy League, are worthless and substandard institutions.

 

This movie looks to be a "must see" for DL aficionados. Here's a synopsis: Hearts of the West.

 

Again, this is basically my point. There are many schools which may not enjoy the utility of an Ivy League school, whose degrees may not propel one as fast and far as say a degree from Harvard. And while the definition of a degree mill is often subjective, I tend to embrace Kristin's perception as stated above.

 

This happens every day! At the community college in the county where I reside, there is a faculty member who has a RA undergrad and masters, and a Cal Coast Ph.D. The CCU doctorate is listed in the school catalog. Upon inquiry I found that the prof is paid at the masters level, but I wonder how many students address him as "Dr. Jones?"

Likewise, there are numerous people who have RA undergrad/grad degrees, and also a state approved doctorate who advance professionally. In some contexts the doctorate is not required for the position, but one is allowed to use the letters. In CA for example, the state approved doctorate allows one to practice psychology.

 

Personally, I use the terms 'degree mill' and 'diploma mill' interchangeably, to refer to schools that are educational frauds. The defining characteristic is a *conscious intention* to mislead either students or their employers into believing that an educational qualification is something that it is not. In that sense 'degree mills' are parasitic upon accepted education. If the latter didn't exist, neither would the mills.

Then there is a whole spectrum of schools radiating outward from there, all the way to the 'best' higher education in the world, wherever and whatever that is.

So the problem in this thread is in characterizing that spectrum.

I get the impression that most people at Degreeinfo, and in higher education generally, think of this spectrum one-dimensionally, in terms of a single variable called 'quality'.

'Quality' is measureable, and schools can be arrayed in rank order according to how much of this mysterious quality they possess.

The ordering may be continuous or discontinuous. According to some people, the 'degree mills' are grouped at one end with no 'quality'at all, with a large empty gulf separating them from the 'legitimate' schools with their varying amounts of 'quality'.

Others see a continuous range of schools from Earlscroft to MIT, without any dramatic gaps at all. But they usually introduce an element of discontinuity all by themselves by arbitrarily bifurcating the line into 'legitimate' and 'degree-mill'.

This group includes the *social critics* who argue that the rest of us draw the dividing line in the wrong place. They accuse us of embracing schools with an insufficient amount of 'quality'. Clearly TESC (or CCU or whatever it is) should be moved across the dividing line into degree-mill hell.

There's something quasi-theological about all this, with a strange hint of religious ethics and even of sin.

Is there such a thing as 'quality'? Is there such a thing as 'beauty' or 'good'? Are they essences, or are they simply words that we use to label totally disseparate collections of things that we happen to respond to in similar ways? Is a 'quality school' really no more than a school offering an education that I approve of?

If I'm right, then the one dimensional quality-line becomes an n-dimensional quality-space. If we can agree on degreemills occupying the central zero point, the 'best' schools represent the outer boundary of the space. Meaning that everyone has their own personal quality line, and that these lines don't lead the same 'best' schools at all. What suits my needs might not suit your needs, and vice versa.

Of course, we aren't all autonomous individuals. We live in a social environment. Few of us are studying for our own purposes, rather we are studying in order to *meet the expectations of others*. We want entry into the jobs that they control, or to be bathed in the respect that they offer.

So that means that we must attend to not only our own personal 'quality line', but to the quality lines of an entire community. That is less difficult that it seems, since all of us *learn* our definitions of quality from the community into which we are socialized. The n-dimensional quality-space becomes divided into a group of quality-bundles composed of different people's own perceptions of quality hierarchies following similar trajectories. They cluster together like ropes composed of fibers.

When that socially recognized quality heirarchy is formalized and a mechanism is set up to enforce it, we call it 'accreditation'. It's just a particular communities shared expectation of what they want from a school.

I'm not saying that it's simply arbitrary. The community doubtless has very good reasons for defining quality as they do. But I'm saying that those reasons might not be universally relevant, nor will everyone agree on what constitutes the 'best' school.

A good community college physics class will have far more "rigor" than does a trendy University of California course in race-class-gender theory.

But just as there is social value in a high school kid wearing exactly the same baggy jeans as his fellows (he will be shunned if he doesn't), there is also value in following academic fashion. That's true whether it's bowing to the USNews tiers or in being politically correct.

 

Some schools are not too happy about the Tier rankings, usually the ones who end up on the bottom year after year. I think some schools see it as a tyranny because of the amount of press the rankings receive every year from sources ranging from the network nightly news to PBS. The pressure is on to rise in the rankings. Texas A&M did that after being in the second tier. Someone had told my wife that A&M wanted to rise to the same level as UT Austin and they have (Top Tier nationally) for about 2 years.

My alma mater in Canada noted that it had become tired of the MacLean's rankings and decided to go ahead and make a couple of minor changes to their methodology would they felt would cause a rise in the standings. At first they tried to blow off the rankings and found that did not work. That is why I say that I think some schools feel the rankings are a tyranny.

North