Life after John Bear: reflections and a proposal

I appreciate Steve Levicoff’s kind words in another thread about life in a post-Bear world. This is a matter I think about a lot, and I’m taking the liberty of starting a new thread on it. Comments will be most welcome.

The main legacy I would hope to leave in this field is a reliable source of information for people in two categories:

1. Those who are looking for either advice or information on degrees and schools: students, would-be students, HR people, reporters, attorneys, etc.

2. Those who could benefit from the information but don’t even know they should ask. Middle-aged middle managers who could use a degree for knowledge or advancement but have neither time nor money nor the knowledge that such things even exist. HR people who have uninformed hiring policies and end up with fake degree holders on their payroll. Many more categories. It’s an never-endng issue. Four million babies were born in the US last year, and not one of them has joined this forum or bought my books!

Of course this forum is a good source, but with nearly 500,000 posts, more than a few of them from unreliable or downright deceitful people, finding the best information or advice is not easy.

Here is what I’d like to do:

1. Create a new product—a physical and an on-line book—that includes the essence of my two main books, Bears’ Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning, and Bears’ Guide to Finding Money for College. Tentative title: Bears’ Guide to Finding and Funding Your Online Degree.

2. Establish an organization that would be involved in creating and updating those two items (schools and funding sources), and be involved in interacting with the above-mentioned clientele: students and would-be students, HR people, reporters, and attorneys. Everything from providing short simple answers to doing consulting, depositions and expert witness testimony. My 16 banker boxes of school and reference materials would be a part of this, as would a comparable storehouse from my colleague and sometime co-author, retired FBI Special Agent Allen Ezell.

The best way I can think of making this happen starts with raising funds through crowd funding: Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, etc. Funds both to hire people to do the research and writing, and to start and run the organization. I would like to think that some of both—the funding and especially the labors—would come from DegreeInfo people.

I am 78 years old, an age at which so many people are, annoyingly, dead. But my health is pretty good, and there are enough neurons still firing to offer hope that I can make this thing happen.

What say you?

Public responses here and private messages will be welcome.

Thank you, from John

John Bear, Ph.D. (Michigan State University)
Author or co-author (with my eldest daughter) of 15 editions of Bears Guide and 3 editions of Finding Money for College.
The complete C.V. is at JOHN BEAR - Home

 

I think this sounds very good.

I was reflecting yesterday upon what would be the single most useful tool to HR professionals and managers. The answer, I think, is a massive database. The National Student Clearinghouse, for a fee, will verify almost any degree. But it has limits. For starters, it doesn't include any NA or FBA accredited degrees.

If a person could punch in some personal information and verify a degree, a school and accreditation all in one spot I think the world of degree verification would be drastically different.

While I think more knowledge is great for everyone there is simply too much for the average HR person to learn. Degree verification is a minor aspect of our jobs. So minor that we often outsource it to companies that know even less about matters of accreditation. It needs to be easy and cheap to really catch on with the biggest possible crowd.

 

I'm nearly 74. When I depart, I'd love to be "annoyingly dead." Really annoying, like I was still alive! And a burden on society. Yeah! (Perhaps I should leave a few posthumous posts.)

What? Another new doctorate? I suppose it'll have to be fast, too... :smile:

J.

 

Neuhaus' idea

I think it's a terrific idea. I thought so in 1990 or 91, when I was living in Hawaii, involved with Greenwich University. Indeed, my colleagues and I decided this would be a great business, doing good and establishing credibility for Greenwich. So we formed a company called "GURU" -- the Greenwich University Registry of Universities. For the heck of it, we even took a booth at the annual convention of what was then the National Home Study Council (now DEAC), meeting in Honolulu. If the volume of the yawns could have been captured and consolidated, it would have been a force-ten gale.

The Bears moved back to the mainland, and Greenwich moved to Norfolk Island, and the idea moved to oblivion. But it's still a very good one.

 

I have yet to encounter a verification service that actually checks accreditation. Most of them, typically bundled with standard background check packages, just verify attendance. If your mill offers a verification service, something many of them offer, then the degree will pass the screening.

When I was hired, the service was unable to verify my BS. They called CTU and tried to verify over the phone and CTU declined citing FERPA. The response was that I had to provide a copy of my diploma. The easiest thing to forge.

One of the reasons this is such a bad system is, as you say, because many people just don't care. You would think verifying degrees would be a top priority for HR. It isn't. That's why we outsource it to mediocre background check companies and wash our hands of it.

In the absence of a comprehensive database that includes graduation info from everyone perhaps the greatest service that could be rolled out would be a comprehensive database of schools. If that were a free service tacked on to a larger project then it might encourage even casual users. The audience I'd imagine are the folks who say "hey, I never heard of that school." I know the USDOE has one for accredited, and formerly accredited, schools. But having the mills and some of the foreign schools listed might be interesting as well. Such a service might even provide a decent lead-in to any other, possibly paid, services this organization might offer. Basically, kind of like the WES degree checker but one that actually works properly.