Judging DL Universities in the UK

Since I have been on this forum, I has noticed U.S. schools being judged based on their RA/NA status. How we as students judge the quality of overseas schools? Example would be DL universities in the UK. (England)

 

Lots of interesting conversation has happened on that topic and you might want to search through our archive of threads to see what others have said about this in the past. Beyond that there are some published rankings. Here's one:

University guide | University league tables for 2011 | Education | guardian.co.uk

I think that the standard ranking system is The Good University Guide which is done by the Times newspaper in England. I couldn't find a free one online but maybe one of our members has latched onto one.

 

Kizmet,

Thanks. I will look at the link you provided. I was wondering this because I have not, at least from the short time I have been a member of DegreeInfo, seen conversation of the sort.

Being that many say that education is better overseas, I was interested in seeing how they stand-up in their rankings.

 

Foreign DL students (and their employers) need to exercise a great deal of caution when confronted with internet degree programs that are ostensibly offered by institutions located in the United Kingdom. The UK has sadly turned into one of the world's most active centers of degree mill activity.

The easiest way to navigate around those rocks is to consult these pages.

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/recognisedukdegrees/

Here's the list of "recognized bodies". These, and only these, institutions have been given official authorization to award British university degrees.

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/recognisedukdegrees/index.cfm?fuseaction=institutes.list&InstituteCategoryID=1

But it's a lot more complicated than that, since there are several hundred additional UK schools called "listed bodies" that don't award their own degrees, but have been given limited rights to remotely offer one or more individual degree programs originating at one of the universities named on the previous list. That 'validating' university is tasked with some of the program-design and oversight aspects of the arrangement.

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/recognisedukdegrees/index.cfm?fuseaction=institutes.list&InstituteCategoryID=2

One of the weaknesses of the British system in the past was the fact that once schools had been given charters that initially authorized them to operate, they didn't receive very much ongoing oversight after that. The problem was recognized and addressed with the creation of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). This organization is analogous to an American university acceditor. It advises the British government on which schools qualify for initial charters, it conducts periodic site visits, it suggest remedial action when appropriate, and it publishes its results in the form of comprehensive reports on the strengths and weaknesses of each British university, available for public viewing on its website. All of the bodies awarding British degrees (those listed in the lists above) automatically fall within the scope of the QAA and can be treated as RA-equivalent.

http://www.qaa.ac.uk

Unfortunately, the UK "reformed" their education laws about ten years ago as part of its attempts to better conform to EU practice. "Foreign" universities that don't purport to award British degrees were given the right to operate inside Britain absolutely 100% unregulated. I'm sure that the intention was that the opportunity would be taken up by legitimate universities from fellow EU members like Germany or Italy and that the universities' home countries would faithfully exercise the necessary oversight.

But in a burst of truly monumental and breathtaking stupidity, the British government has interpreted "foreign university" to mean any enterprise that possesses an off-shore business license. In many cases these things' only known physical address is in the UK. If there is an address in the "home" country, it's almost always a mail-forwarder or an off-shore business registration firm. So as a result of these brilliant "reforms", a "foreign university" can be 100% British-based and run by British residents, but still technically be a "foreign university" even if it doesn't have any existence at all in the country where it supposedly originates and even if people there have never heard of it.

There are probably several hundred of these scams currently operating from British addresses. Anybody who does internet searches for British DL degree programs can't avoid encountering them. In fact, it's likely that the majority of the DL programs originating in the UK are bogus. These things often boast websites absolutely filled with fake Oxbridge-style British "tradition" and feature photographs of grand "convocations" in expensive locations where everyone's dressed in robes and funny hats. The target audiences usually seems to be in Asia and the Middle East, where people eat up that kind of stuff.