Top DEAC schools for DBA?

Discussion in 'Business and MBA degrees' started by SamSam, Apr 4, 2019.

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  1. felderga

    felderga Active Member

    I think I would get more out of Capella as they require a two residency meetings for their DBA program. Also students are assigned a mentor for the dissertation/capstone project. Right now I'm leaning toward Columbia Southern (primarily for the lower cost) but if I can make it work I might go with Capella for their DHA program instead (no residency but still provided with mentor support).
     
  2. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    Every doctoral student at any school will have some kind of mentor; the titles just differ. Capella and schools like it are notorious for high turnover rates, and students have sued these schools because of this. Their completion is often delayed by new chairs and committee members who have new demands or need to catch up on what the student has done. This increases the cost of the degree far beyond what's advertised. Ultimately, most won't graduate.

    Personally, I would lean toward an RA doctorate, but I would avoid Capella, Walden, and Northcentral.

    I don't know how long the residencies are at Capella, but I question how much one can get out of being at a hotel or a convention center-like environment for a week or two.
     
  3. RFValve

    RFValve Well-Known Member

    Since there is no ranking for DEAC accredited schools that I know, employers or customers (if self employed) would not see much difference among them so it is a personal choice. I would use three main criteria when selecting the school: Time in business, cost and time to complete. Many of the DEAC accredited schools go out of business really fast, so a new school might be a risky proposition and you don't want to end with a credential from a school that does not longer exist. Since the perception of these schools is similar, I would check cost and factor in time in business and completion times. Completion time is important, some DBAs require a long list of courses that perhaps you already have completed in your MBA so it is redundant to do them again while other DBAs only focus on specialization courses and dissertation so the latter are better in my book.
    And I agree that DEAC might be a good option for self improvement. Again, some people are already making a 200K plus a year and don't need a fancy degree that would add almost no value to their existing salary and just want it for self improvement and to show in a resume commitment to continuing education.
     
  4. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    EdSmart took a crack at it some time ago, but it was all NA schools, not just DEAC. Of those, they ranked California Coast University as #1.

    Hmmm. I haven't observed that. Most of the DETC schools I remember back in the early 2000's are either still with the DEAC, some under a different name, some left and became regionally accredited, some decided to go on unaccredited (rarest scenario), or some went off to gain ASIC accreditation (next to rarest scenario). I have seen a number go out of business, but most of the schools I remember going out had already been around for a while.

    But, I'm only looking at the early 2000's and up, so your frame of reference may be years deeper than mine.
     
  5. RFValve

    RFValve Well-Known Member

    Just in 2006 5 closed down:
    https://www.deac.org/Public-Notices/Closed-Institution.aspx

    I was hired but never got to teach a course at University of Atlanta that closed very fast:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Atlanta

    In the late 90's, I was scheduled to train for another DEAC accredited school that closed before I was able to attend the training.

    Yes, based on my experience, DEAC schools are fragile as many are virtual operations with little assets that can easily be disolved if profits are not there.
     
    JBjunior likes this.
  6. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    I don't think University of Atlanta officially hit the dirt until last year? Because they became ASIC accredited (for whatever that's worth) and were still operating up until some point last year or late the year prior. So that's a good 15-18 years of operation. That's not bad, except the school was terrible.

    This has made me interested in taking a look at just how many DEAC schools have closed, left for other accreditation, changed their name/transferred/sold their school to another corporation or closed.

    With regard to "Yes, based on my experience, DEAC schools are fragile as many are virtual operations with little assets that can easily be dissolved if profits are not there." I'd say that's simply the reality of business in general since most start small with little assets, so that's not so much a DEAC issue as it is the nature of business.
     
  7. RFValve

    RFValve Well-Known Member

    For a business 15 to 18 years is not bad but my guess is that those poor students with DBAs from the University of Atlanta would disagree that 15-18 years was worth the investment.

    A DBA is supposed to be a life time investment and not only good for 10 to 15 years. DEAC is already hard to sell, imagine to sell a DBA from a defunct school that once was DEAC accredited.

    Was University of Atlanta bad? I don't have the metrics to back this up but the market did not like the school for sure, but what metrics do you have to ensure that the rest of the DEAC schools offering DBAs are good?

    Not so sure if the DBA from a DEAC accredited school is worth the investment from the ROI point of view but if a person wants the self improvement and the ego boost of calling one self "Dr", then go for it. But if you do want the DBA to call yourself Dr., I would make sure that it last until my retirement and not just 10 to 15 years.
     
  8. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    I don't want to sound mean toward any student that got their DBA through that school, but Barrington/Iverson/University of Atlanta's reputation was so bad that I couldn't imagine going with them unless I just had no idea, and even then that would mean I didn't do any digging to find out what kind of rep the school had, in which case that would still be on me as a student for not looking into it.

    I agree that from a student's standpoint the year count is not good. But, if you got the degree from UofA, I'm not so sure it really loses much if any value as a result of the school being dead. I mean, in some ways, its being dead may be a blessing in disguise because it will mean less people will have heard of it, and the school is no longer around to do any more damage to its already wrecked reputation with those who have heard of it.
     
  9. RFValve

    RFValve Well-Known Member

    The assumption that an employer is going to tell the difference between UoA or any other of DEAC accredited schools might not be accurate. Yes, in the DL world people know these schools very well as yourself but for the average employer, a distance education school accredited by DEAC has no ranking and put in the same basket. Just make a survey and send it to several employers and ask them if they can tell the difference between UoA and CSU? See if how it goes, some might even think that UoA is better just because the name sounds official.

    A DBA from a defunct DEAC school has almost no value in my opinion, in theory it can be validated but very few would go to the trouble to do research about it, they will just assume that the degree is bogus or ignore it.

    Thanks for the discussion, I just wanted to bring to the table that these schools go out business and one must be careful when selecting one. Some schools have been there for more than fifty years and have a good chance of being there for the next 50 while a brand new one might die in ten or twenty or fifty but why take a chance?

    If time in business was not an issue, how would you explain that new schools have lower tuition fees if it is not to compensate this risk? People take the chance with newer schools mainly because of price in my opinion.
    There is no right or wrong answer for this discussion so I will not continue the conversation. It is up to the OP to evaluate his or her options and move on.
     
  10. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    For-profit schools, RA or NA, are always in danger of going out of business. Small, non-profit schools are also always in danger of going out of business. About 40% of for-profit campuses have closed in the past decade. I just noticed that University of the Rockies, which was regionally accredited, was merged with Ashford due to financial issues. That school no longer exists. Argosy is going away. Western International University and Patten University are gone. Kaplan was absorbed into the Purdue System, so those students lucked out. I won't be surprised if Colorado Technical University and American Intercontinental shut down in a few years.
     
    Maxwell_Smart and JBjunior like this.
  11. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    You've actually stated plenty of wrong answers.

    What you're missing is that the general employer is going to put every non-name brand school they don't recognize in the same basket, because the average employer doesn't know nor give a damn about the RA/NA debates we get into here, with the exception of some that have specifically detailed this identification in their department guidelines. Guidelines in place, ask the average person working there what it means and they go into a number of popular wives tales usually slanted against NA education (kind of like what you did here). The guidelines are there at times in those departments, but the proper understanding less so.

    To be clear and accurate (your personal feelings having no bearing on the factual state of the matter) a DBA earned while accredited from any defunct school still has value, and that includes a DEAC school. The notion you posit to the contrary is flatly absurd and inaccurate. A school being defunct doesn't somehow invalidate an earned degree. It doesn't work that way. You clearly don't value DEAC very much which is what you're really getting at with your position, and that's fine, but let's at least speak accurately, because this is exactly the kind of nonsense that we need to make sure we're not perpetuating to the unknowledgeable public here, and you've been here long enough and know enough about this system to know better. It's one thing to point out the utility limitations of an NA degree, but you took that one way off the island and I don't at all see why you felt the need to do that.

    If the degree was earned, it can still be verified, it will still have value just as any other program from any other defunct school, and the person in the hiring department can easily google it to see that the school existed at one time, it's not like all traces of information of the school will simply vanish into thin air, lol. Obviously, an RA degree will generally have greater utility but that's a separate argument and has nothing to do with the point.

    How do you explain new schools, or newly accredited schools that have comparably high tuition rates? Those exist, too, specifically in the DEAC realm since a lot of them carry tuition rates as high or higher than some longer established schools now. Every DEAC school isn't doing business like Ashworth/Penn Foster.

    This is another reason RF's postings on this are bizarre. On one hand he positions that hiring departments would put all DEAC schools in the same basket, but on the other hand positions that they wouldn't be able to differentiate between them. That makes no sense because in order to do either it would require research since they're generally not going to automatically know what schools are or aren't DEAC in the first place. When they research University of Atlanta, they're going to find some bad stuff and find it easily, things that they won't find with most other DEAC schools.

    Exactly. And just like LA stated, this is an issue of for-profit business, not an issue specific to the DEAC. End of story.
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2019
  12. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    And, I believe the biggest closures have been ACICS schools along with some for-profit, RA schools. I'm aware of some ACCSC schools also having major closures, but they didn't get as much attention in national news.
     
    Maxwell_Smart likes this.
  13. SamSam

    SamSam New Member

    I wonder whether U.S. NA/DEAC degrees are recognized in other 1st world countries?
     
  14. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    I'm pretty sure I heard that the UK Naric doesn't recognize it as being equivalent. When I applied for my MBA program in India, the evaluation board didn't recognize online degrees as being equivalent. I don't know if things changed since 2014. The school didn't require me to have my degree evaluated though so I was accepted and completed my degree with them. I know of one developing Caribbean country that doesn't accept DEAC degree as being equivalent anymore. They underwent some changes when online degrees were becoming very popular in that country back in 2012. Prior to that, DEAC degrees were considered equivalent.
     
  15. Ted Heiks

    Ted Heiks Moderator and Distinguished Senior Member

    Top DEAC schools seems like an oxymoron.
     
    cronus likes this.
  16. Michigan68

    Michigan68 Active Member

    Why?

    Grantham has DEAC and ABET accredited electronics program.

    Ashworth, Penn Foster do not have an ABET accredited electronics/electrical program.

    So for electronics......Grantham is the top DEAC program for electronics.
     
    chrisjm18 likes this.
  17. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    Yes, but only to those who have a bias against the DEAC...
     
  18. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    And a lot of regionally accredited schools haven't achieved that and never will, so that's a very big plus for Grantham. Quite a few haters had to eat crow when the announcement of their ABET accreditation came.
     
  19. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    I'm not a Grantham hater but I WAS surprised by the school gaining ABET accreditation. I still don't know how that came about.
     
  20. Ted Heiks

    Ted Heiks Moderator and Distinguished Senior Member

    Other regional accrediting bodies? DEAC is not a regional accrediting body. DEAC is a national accrediting body.
     
    SteveFoerster likes this.

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