My journey to becoming a Liberty Ph.D. student

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by chrisjm18, Dec 15, 2018.

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  1. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    I care so much that I've only quoted one of your responses which wasn't even directed at me. The other response in which I actually acknowledged you was the one where I told you that I didn't care. Don't interpret my last post as me reading your several responses. I glanced at them, at best.
     
  2. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    I’ll give my 2 cents for what it is worth seeing as how I have no issues with Chris, Sanantone, or Steve.

    Where one decides to pursue their formal education is up to them. As long as they weigh the pros and cons of each university they are looking into, where they decide to spend their money, unless they are fully funded by faculty, is up to them.

    I think many can say they did not select the “best” school as seen by US News but they selected the best school for them personally.
     
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  3. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member


    You responded to me again.
     
  4. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    That's fine and dandy, but that wasn't the point of my posts. Unlike some other members, I don't regularly attack people's school choices. I didn't even criticize Chris for his school choice. All I did was refute information that was previously presented by others, and someone got sensitive about it.
     
  5. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    Keep in mind that the U.S. News' rankings aren't valued by everyone. How credible is a ranking system that relies on schools to provide their own data? Credible enough for the now-ousted Temple business dean to fabricate data which allowed their online MBA to be ranked #1 for several years. There are several other cases which also include law schools.

    https://www.salon.com/2014/09/15/the_big_college_ranking_sham_why_you_must_ignore_u_s_news_and_worlds_report_list/

    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/why-college-rankings-are-a-joke.html

    https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/your-annual-reminder-to-ignore-the-em-us-news-world-report-em-college-rankings/279103/

    https://news.gcu.edu/2018/09/why-gcu-skips-u-s-news-world-report-rankings/

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwasik/2017/09/15/why-you-should-ignore-us-news-college-list/#67fc2c6777d3
     
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  6. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

    Honestly, Liberty is not a school for everyone. Liberty is somewhat controversial. Liberty also has a very strong political and religious bent. So, this is not for everyone.
     
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  7. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Josh is obsessed with AACSB accreditation, but how reliable is that? There are always organizations and individuals defrauding the system. UNC has been regionally accredited for a very long time, and they were offering fake classes to athletes and other students. Many accredited for-profit schools have been caught making up their jobs numbers, but it took many years for them to get caught. So, does that make accreditation unreliable? You do know that schools often supply information to accreditors and do self-assessments for renewal, right?

    Anyway, reading comprehension is not the forte of some. Whether any of you value rankings does not matter. In some occupations, rankings do matter; in other occupations, rankings don't matter. In academia, you have to deal with the reality that rankings do matter a lot. No amount of supplying links to opinion articles is going to change that.
     
  8. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    To continue with Josh's obsession with accreditation for everything, many of the best computer science programs forego ABET accreditation because they find it meaningless. AACSB accreditation is also meaningless for the overwhelming majority of business jobs. Johns Hopkins managed to have high rankings and a good reputation without AACSB accreditation. They only recently obtained it. But, before Johns Hopkins attained programmatic accreditation for its business school, it was still way better than all the podunk state universities that already had AACSB accreditation.

    None of this changes the fact that AACSB-accredited schools strongly prefer professors who graduated from AACSB-accredited schools. For just about everyone else outside of academia, it doesn't matter. When I interviewed for the tax enforcement job I'll be starting soon, no one said, "Gee, TESU is only ACBSP-accredited?"
     
    Last edited: Dec 16, 2018
  9. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    I agree that accreditation is meaningless for many occupations however I have seen a lot of positions outside of academia requiring a degree from ABET-Accredited programs. As for business, you are correct that 99% of positions could care less about accredition and most will state nothing about accreditation as long as you have the MBA. Also, I would not call it an obsession. It is a preference.

    I am not certain what the stab at me was for? I have stayed neutral in my comments.
     
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  10. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    On the first page of this thread, JoshD expressed a preference for AACSB programs. I would hardly call that an obsession.

    sanantone, however, calls that an obsession twice in the last two posts. I see no reason for that except, perhaps, that sanantone is now trying to provoke Josh, who has never been controversial in this forum.

    So in this thread alone, sanantone has been in a blatant attack mode when it comes to Chris, Josh, and me. I feel comfortable in saying at this juncture that it makes sanantone a worthless POS as well as an anonymous troll. And statistically a sexist, although I do seem to recall her attacking Jennifer as well at one point. And her attacks on Bruce are a classic, even though they share a professional background in law enforcement (although, unlike Bruce, sanantone has never been a cop).

    One thing that sanantone has in common with our recently departed friend me again is that, while both of them are obnoxious, they both have valuable contributions to make about nontraditional education. The problem is that, when they purport their opinions to be indisputable facts, the skew their reliability so badly that nothing they say can, in the end run, be trusted. They are both an example of the notion that a little bit of knowledge is worse than none at all.

    Ah, well, at least we're a happy family, albeit a somewhat dysfunctional one.
     
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  11. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    ABET accreditation is very important for engineering, but not computer science. USPTO cares about ABET accreditation for computer science for patent agents and patent attorneys, but hardly anyone else outside of academia requires or prefers it. Stanford University decided that there is no value in having ABET accreditation for its computer science programs. Stanford graduates have no problem with getting jobs.

    https://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/ug/Considering.shtml
     
  12. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    LOL. Steve, you've attacked way more people than I have. Really, you attacked me first in this thread. Chris also gave attitude toward me when I said nothing about him personally. I believe the sexism is the other way around.

    Josh hasn't only talked about AACSB accreditation in this thread (AACSB accreditation has nothing to do with CJ). He's talked about it in many threads. I have no problem with Josh, though. However, if he's going to misrepresent my comments, he is not immune to my responses.
     
  13. Jan

    Jan Member

    "Mickey Mouse"? You're being kind. At the time Levicoff and others took their doctoral programs at Union it was just as Levicoff described it, "Name it and Frame it", a loosely constructed "degree" program that allowed many students to graduate with so-called doctoral degrees, many with essay level dissertations, which would NEVER pass muster with the rigorous academic criteria required by any legitimate RA doctoral degree program.
     
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  14. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Well, Steve thinks that his self-designed degree in theology and law makes him an expert in CJ because he keeps interjecting himself in these topics. He can never back up his claim that colleges and universities prefer hiring professors with law enforcement experience. All one has to do is look at faculty lists. Their CVs or biographies are often public. What is way more common is that highly-ranked programs will only hire professors who graduated from highly-ranked programs.

    There are hardly any women on this forum because of the behaviors of the men around here.
     
  15. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Steve, I am not anonymous. People from this forum have contacted me on Facebook. I don't want wackos like you having my personal info. But, if I were trying to take advantage of being anonymous, I could easily lie about what degrees I have and where I went to school. I could tell everyone that I have a degree from an Ivy League school, but I have not. You are not anonymous (if Steve Levicoff is your real name), but you're still a troll and a loser.
     
  16. Phdtobe

    Phdtobe Well-Known Member

    This December we celebrate accredited Education! We curse diploma mills. We honor our graduates, especially those who have made the ultimate sacrifice and earned their phd. We encourage those who are still traveling along that difficult road with us.
     
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  17. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    Sanantone:

    I am not a engineering or CS expert and I admittedly have done very little research on ABET accreditation. That said, I am proud of my education, the university I am pursuing my MBA at, and the accreditating body they chose to be accredited by.

    I did not mean to hijack this thread to turn in into anything other than Chris’ PhD journey. I just mentioned that I prefer AACSB and Liberty is ACBSP and only offers a DBA instead of a PhD. I planned to leave it at that.

    Anywho, I have my 21 month old twins crawling all over me and a 24 week pregnant wife wanting to grab lunch. I will check back in later but hopefully the thread gets back on course.
     
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  18. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    One sub-field of criminal justice that many CJ professionals have little knowledge of is security. This includes personal security and cybersecurity (cybersecurity is increasingly being included in CJ programs). I once had a psycho I interacted with online stalk me and send me racially and sexually harassing text messages. Jennifer, not too long ago, had an online stalker who posted her address online for everyone to see. She was scared for her family's safety. Don't let people pressure you into giving out your personal information. All a person needs is a unique combination of a first and last name to find your address and phone number; I know because I've had to hunt down absconders. It helps further if the person knows what state you live in, where you work or used to work, and where you go to school or used to go to school. Many forum members here have all of this info displayed somewhere. Women need to be especially careful!
     
  19. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    Much as it may surprise her, I'm pleased to endorse sanantone's advice 100 percent.

    I've been busting degree mills for some 30 years now (Name It & Frame It? started as a paper I wrote during my M.A. program at Vermont College of Norwich U.), and I realized at the beginning that I was likely to make enemies by exposing degree mills - not only the mills themselves, but the people who got degrees from them. I also had people who tried to make personal information public - such as my address, which they always got wrong. Those so-called enemies (I use the term with a grain of salt) also include people who have attended or graduated from schools that I consider inferior although they may not be degree mills. (Current example: Jan's obsession with IUGS in the Caribbean.)

    Then, of course, there were the lawsuit threats. I had about 50 of them, but only one school actually sued me - MIGS (see the MIGS forum here on DegreeInfo). John Bear has had several actual suits over the years, and Rich Douglas had the most recent prominent suit by a degree mill. I used to say that being sued is the ultimate baptism for a degree mill buster. And, needless to say, degree mill shills will do their best to trash your own credentials, as sanantone and Jan do when they talk about my RA doctoral alma mater.

    But sanantone is right about one thing: The Internet is full of psychotic whack jobs. As much as it's easy to make fun of her being an anonymous troll (which she is), I full agree with her decision to be an anonymous troll. There is, indeed, a risk factor not to be anonymous in the field of distance education, as people ranging from George Gollin to John Bear to Rich Douglas to Uncle Janko can tell you from the dltruth forum.

    I've always taken steps to ensure my privacy and safety despite not being anonymous. It worked well until the other Steve Levicoff became an Internet presence on Facebook and people started to think he was me. (By the way, the other S.L. has not posted since August 6, 2017. It makes me wonder if he's dead at this point, or if he simply lost interest in being a right wingnut.)

    Anyway, I'm willing to give credit where it's due. sanantone may be a racist, sexist, ignorant, obnoxious POS, but she aced it on this message. And I'm able to compliment her freely on this because I have a Ph.D. And she doesn't.:D
     
  20. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    When have I ever been a degree mill shill? Your senility is showing again. Anyway, all of my degrees are from public universities, and I've managed to get into competitive programs, not just open admission programs.

    The moderators on this forum are worthless. So, I'll take the opportunity to say that Steve Levicoff basks in his worthless glory here because no one has cared about him for decades. It's a sure sign of an unloved person. I also suspect that Steve has anti-social personality disorder, but one can't give an accurate diagnosis based on written text. I also suspect that Steve doesn't know what racism and sexism mean. He doesn't even know frequently used higher education terms.
     

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