DEAC Accredited PhDs?

Discussion in 'Accreditation Discussions (RA, DETC, state approva' started by Neuhaus, Aug 29, 2016.

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  1. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    It could happen...

    Source

    Also, it looks like the University of Fairfax managed to pull themselves back from the brink. They were on a show cause order issued earlier this year and received their renewal during the last meeting of DEAC.

    Hopefully this is truly a sign that DEAC is running a much tighter ship than ACICS and that DEAC schools are meeting the challenge.
     
  2. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    I think the important question is, how would DEAC-accredited Ph.D.'s be received?

    Based on the piling-on currently happening with RA schools that are for-profit, and the persistent myth that online schools in general are substandard, I don't think they'll be received well at all.
     
  3. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I think it will depend more on the individual than the accreditation. There are a handful of top programs that might immediately impress. Then there are schools that are unquestionably "legitimate" in the eyes of the masses. They may not Impress but they likely won't draw ire.

    Beyond that, the unknown schools are likely to draw, primarily, indifference. If you piss someone off then maybe you'll get negativity like that Union grad who was called out on a blog for having a PhD from a diploma mill.

    But I'd say a DEAC PhD will be received about as well as a DEAC accredited EdD. In some situations it will be perfectly fine. In others it won't cut it. If a person is a publishing machine then maybe they will have a different outcome.
     
  4. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    OK by me - though they never asked.... But somehow, I'm hearing eerie, mocking laughter from a truck-stop somewhere in the USA. :smile:

    J.
     
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  5. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    Wasn't the University of Atlanta briefly issuing Doctorates under the then DETC? I also thought California Coast was doing PhD's at one point, can't remember if CCU was accredited or not at the time.

    Correct me if I'm wrong.
     
  6. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    Up till this pilot, DETC has been strictly first professional doctorates only - no PhDs. IIRC CalCoast only awarded them prior to accreditation.

    J.
     
  7. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I, personally, am not a believer in Rich Douglas's notion of workplace professionals benefitting from a doctorate to improve their "professional practice." Not my thing.

    But you know all those times when a professor's time bomb explodes because, after years of teaching with a Masters, they suddenly pop up with a PhD from a mill? What if they begin earning NA doctorates instead? Every example of a for-profit PhD holder we typically conjure up had the job before the doctorate and they weren't immediately run from town by an angry mob. I suspect the same would be true of a DEAC accredited PhD.

    Still, I'm curious how many schools will actually take part and if we will see a variety of fields represented or if all of the DBAs and EdDs will just get rebranded.
     
  8. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    Thanks, Johann.
     
  9. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    I'm confident the DEAC will handle this properly, especially under their current leadership. At the moment, they're one of the few NA accreditors not under scrutiny, but that might be because they're so far off the radar. That of course can work against a PhD if no one has ever heard of your school, but at least it won't be an issue of the DEAC having any bad publicity firestorms (knock on wood).
     
  10. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I don't think being on the radar is a good thing for an accreditor.

    NYSBOR is off the radar but that hasn't held back the PhD programs at Memorial Sloane Kettering or Rockefeller. I'm sure that those institutions, and their alumni, carved that path more than their accreditor.

    People don't think in terms of accreditors. They typically think in terms of institutions. DEAC doesn't really have a flag ship institution. But if it did I would imagine Penn Foster and Ashworth would be in the running for that title. Compare their reputations to, say, ITT Tech, which became synonymous with ACICS in the media.

    But it isn't as if ITT Tech was their only problem. Remember that post a few months ago from the person who said that another ACICS school was awarding them an honorary doctorate as soon as they made a large donation to the school? There were/are some shenanigans over there that, frankly, would be shocking if we saw them at a DEAC school.
     
  11. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Agreed, or at least I see no reason why not. It's just not that big a change, and since research doctorates have been offered by RA schools for years it's nothing new.

    I don't see why they'd be further off the radar than ACICS, which went from no one other than people on this forum knowing what they were to KABOOM in, like, fifteen seconds.

    Many people, including myself, find that lesser known schools are a good fit for a PhD program. I think it all depends on what one's goals are.
     
  12. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    ACICS went from 0-60 in what seemed like a few seconds. But ITT Tech was on the radar for far longer.

    I'm unaware of DEAC having a large embarrassment school that represents such a sizable portion of their accredited institutions the way ACICS had ITT Tech. The especially sketchy DEAC schools tend to lose their accreditation.
     
  13. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    Not saying it's good or bad, just that the DEAC exists in near anonymity compared to their counterparts. We generally don't hear anything about an accreditor until one of its schools gets into trouble and for the most part that's been an issue the DEAC has been fortunate to avoid.

    I would say both could be interchangeable as their flagship school. They are the most "tried and true", they bring in most of the enrollments and are the most well-known within that fold of lesser-known schools.
     
  14. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    My comment was meant to denote that the schools under DEAC are generally lesser known, and of course there are significantly fewer of those schools when compared to other national accreditors like ACICS, so the exposure is much lower.
     
  15. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    They're also very unlikely to result in scandal. Neither accepts Federal Financial Aid. And the only way you could graduate in debt is if you put your entire education on your credit card. Even if you did it would take only a minor bump in your pay to justify the $7k - $10k you spent on a degree.

    My point is just that ITT Tech wasn't the best thing for ACICS to be known for. And even though DEAC doesn't have a school that draws as much negative attention as ITT Tech, consider what a typical uninformed journalist would do/say upon looking at the two schools we just identified as DEAC's top institutions...

    Two schools that plaster their front page with sale ads.

    Even though Ashworth and PF are, arguably, of higher quality than ITT the appearance isn't so great. As Steve said, ACICS was fairly anonymous as well until one day when they absolutely were not. DEAC has a lot more going for it and I believe has fewer red flags around its schools. But it is hardly blogger-proof.
     
  16. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    I've always been against the way Ashworth and Penn Foster present themselves. The front page sales pitch is too much, I agree.
     
  17. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    I'm going to agree with Neuhaus this time. I don't think that the accreditor is a primary variable in how Ph.Ds are received.

    In the sciences at least, perceived program strength is largely a function of who is teaching in the program and the program's research reputation in its field. For example, the NY State Regents are an exceedingly obscure accreditor, yet Rockefeller University, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the American Museum of Natural History and Sloan Kettering don't have any problem placing graduates. That's because these were big-time research institutions that had established reputations before they rolled out their doctoral programs. (Having a few faculty members win Nobel Prizes doesn't hurt.)

    So I've long argued that if DETC/DEAC wants its schools' Ph.D. programs to be taken seriously, they need to pressure schools with Ph.D. aspirations to create some research units and to start actively participating in the intellectual life of their subjects now. That probably should be made a requirement for accreditation of proposed Ph.D. programs.

    Unfortunately, I think that most of these DEAC schools have very limited resources. They aren't really universities in the same sense that Yale and UCLA are. Most seem to be small proprietorships, owned by individuals. So they will have to figure out how to compete for research funding too.

    Right. That's how DEAC Ph.D.s will almost certainly be received, unless some of these schools start building reputation and make themselves impossible to ignore, by producing work that everyone in a particular research specialty has to study in order to stay current.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 30, 2016
  18. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    And that's highly unlikely to happen.

    The unaccredited Rushmore University attempts to legitimize its graduate program by mandating work publishing. The flaw there is that no matter how much material gets published, if the school isn't respected the works will be dismissed by the field it's targeting.
     
  19. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    That's not how publication works.

    If your work starts getting accepted into recognized peer reviewed journals and you are regularly attending conferences then your profile as an academic is going to improve. If a number of people from the same school start doing the same then the profile of your school, in that field, will improve.

    The reason why it doesn't work for schools like Rushmore is that they aren't publishing in recognized peer reviewed journals. Much like many of the mills out there the mandated publications are either self-published or simply included in, what I can best describe as, publication mills.

    Real academics put forth a lot of work on their branding. It isn't uncommon for them to spend all of that "downtime" in the summer on research, writing and attending conferences around the world. Those conferences and those journals include the work of people who only have a masters degree as well as the occasional amateur who broke into the field without a degree. The way those unicorns raised their profile, without even having an alma mater, is their exposure to the academic community.

    Peer review doesn't factor in your school. The author of a paper is unknown to the editors of a journal. So if your work is getting published then you are clearly sounding competent enough to run with the big dogs.
     
  20. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    That would be North Carolina, which is where I was when I first saw this thread.

    I have seen DEAC through three incarnations, the first of which was NHSC (the National Home Study Council), which accredited correspondence programs. And did so quite well. (Remember the famous ads that asked if you could draw Sparky the squirrel, or whatever his name was?) Then DETC, and now DEAC. With each new incarnation, they expanded their scope to include undergrad degree programs, then masters programs, then professional doctorates, and now…

    What has always differentiated the Ph.D. from other, newer doctorates is that the Ph.D. is a research-oriented scholarly degree. In short, they produce scholars who are able to make a significant contribution to thee body of scholarly literature in their field (that’s the basic definition of a dissertation). Somehow, I can’t see DEAC schools pulling that off.

    On the other hand, I envision Sparky the squirrel (or whatever his name was) now wearing an academic robe with three stripes on the sleeve. And that does result in my emitting “a form of eerie, mocking laughter.”

    I’ve been laughing at DEAC for several years now. And certainly, when it comes to any doctorate, academic or professional, I remain “RA or the highway.” Or, in my case, RA and the highway. :cool:
     

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