Why the animosity between DETC and RA?

In a nutshell, I think Chip summed it up quite well. DETC has come a long way, and will continue to improve into the future as it becomes more familiar among college/university registration/transfer staff. I think the discussions have become a bit denigrating towards the pro DETC crowd. Suddenly, if one makes a positive statement about a DETC NA school, they have some kind of agenda?

Folks, we know the drill, most us have debated this topic over and over again. I will once again state, a degree, regardless of accreditor, is merely a "piece of paper". It is up to the owner of that piece of paper to excel. How many people do we know, or have read about that have a degree from Harvard working at Starbucks as a Barista? There is nothing wrong with being a Barista, but I merely wish to illustrate a point.

I would say, yes, DETC degree have some utility issues, but then, so do some RA degrees. For example, my wife attended a B&M college. She then transferred to a sister college in the same district. They did not accept some of the transfer credits even though the college had the same affiliation. That is merely one small example of RA transfer issues.

So in conclusion, it is fine to discuss limitations, but it should be done in a constructive manner. As of late, I think the constructive part has went down the tubes. I will dedicate my efforts to affect positive change, rather than engage in circular arguments.

Abner

 

Wow, I think this is a great thread, basically, because I'm rather new and haven't made my way through all the posts and threads, as of yet. I've learned quite a bit just on this thread, alone.

In any case, my own view is that it is up to the student (or consumer, depending on pov) to determine what he or she wishes to gain with a particular degree from a particular school (which, I believe, most have pretty much noted). I would add such decisions may also be a case of 'buyer be ware' because it is up to the prospective student to know and understand what accreditation means, how it may or may not affect his or her goals, and so on.

Possibly, and this is only my take on things, the stigma attached to distance learning, in any form, just hasn't died as of yet.

When I began as an instructor in online learning for an online for-profit eight years ago, there was the conception that online learning, in any form, could not be as rigorous as that experienced in a traditional environment and, hence, it was lesser in some way. Less than two years later, the traditional for which I worked was looking to expand all lower division, gen ed course offerings to the online platform. In my department, I was the first to be offered a position doing the online classes because I was the only one who had any experience doing online classes.

I still see the attitude, on ocassion, that distance learning (which, for the most part equates to online learning, these days) is inferior. I continue to beg to differ, but, I still see the prejudice from time to time.

Too, no matter what school one chooses to attend, it is up to the individual school whether or not to accept transfer credits. Many programs at my traditional only accept up to 12 hours, as a rule, no matter how many credits an individual may hold. The school catalogue, as I recall, is, or was when I was a student, pretty clear on that aspect.

DrB

 

I guess so... because most people seem unaware of the ecological fallacy: the mistake of conferring properties of the group upon an individual of the group. For example, the dumbest guy ever to graduate from Stanford might actually be lower on all measures than the smartest person ever to graduate from Truckee Meadows Community College. And the former enjoys seemingly unearned benefits while the latter enjoys none...

 

This is like that old joke: "What do you call the person who graduated last in medial school? Doctor."

 

Good points Dr.B 5 to 10 years ago, DL regardless of accreditation was considered a joke. Things are improving as DL becomes more familiar among HR staff, etc.

Abner

 

DegreeDazed,

I, in no way, meant to discredit your post with my attempt at humour, we have gone over this topic in so many ways that I thought I would add a little levity to the thread!

Now, to respond to your question I would say this:

1) RA is associated with traditional education, there are a ton of people who have a vested interest in this topic. Be particularly aware of those who will tell you they, "don't have a dog in this race", ......... they always do.

2) The "changing of the guard" is a generational process and so we'll have to wait until a large quantity of old school academics retire, before we'll notice a "C" change in attitudes toward NA/DETC.

Next, let's talk about RA versus NA versus DETC:
How much of a difference do you think there is in the quality of education between a Harvard graduate who got there by studying a ECON 101 course versus an NA/DETC student who read the exact same textbook, did their homework and passed their exams on such a well-defined, predictable subject? Not much. Considering the personal retention rates when we do study, I would bet it is negligible at best.

The final point I would make is that when someone claims, "that it is the DETC educated members of this site are trying to justify their choice of education", ...... let's make certain that it is in fact, NA/DETC members actually trying to do this! I for one have never taken a NA/DETC course in my life and I support the NA/DETC process 100%.

My personal experience has been that very few RA DL programs are excellent, and many aren't worth, or can live up to, their accreditation. How can a growing community of DL schools, where students seek out they educational programs, and where growth is such, that RA schools feel the need to mimic them, be so poorly received? It's a matter of time before NA/DETC will become mainstream, students are demanding it and they will represent the major one day. Once the old school generation depart, we will see this accelerate.

Education is what you make of it. In the end, you are judged on YOU as a person, the degree represents a very small part of the package that is YOU, if you can provide greater services to the community with a NA/DETC education, you will excel too. NA/DETC is here to stay, there is rarely a RA student who isn't taking at least one DL course from their school program, and they can thank NA/DETC for the right to be able to accomplish that.

 

I would disagree. As I think I've clearly stated, at this point, I don't have any problem with someone who chooses to go with a DETC degree, *provided* that they make that decision consciously, and aware of the potential limitations, at least at present. I think the overwhelming majority of those who support RA over DETC at DegreeInfo probably share that viewpoint. My issue is when a school minimizes or neglects to mention the difference and a graduate finds out, maybe years later, that s/he can't do something s/he assumed the degree would allow him/her to do.

This is sort of a chicken-and-egg argument. I don't think it's generational. There is a pretty strong argument to be made that research influences the quality of academia, and DETC schools, so far at least, have virtually no research going on. Ergo, RA schools where research is being done may be providing better than DETC schools (or for-profit RA schools where no research is happening.)

If you're talking solely about 100 level classes, I would agree. Harvard and other Ivys use TAs and graduate students to teach most 100 level undergrad classes, and they are gigantic lecture classes that mostly follow the textbooks, so arguably DETC schools and even community colleges may actually provide better education in these areas if the profs are experienced and are supplementing the learning from the textbook.

However, at higher levels, there's no comparision. First, the ability of a given student to handle an academically rigorous course at a very selective Ivy school will be much greater than at an essentially non-selective DETC school, or, for that matter, a "we take almost anyone" state school. So at the Ivys, the instruction will be much faster paced, more in-depth, cover a lot more, and require a lot more critical thinking than at a non-rigorous RA school in Arkansas or somewhere, or, in most cases, a DETC school.

Secondly, at selective schools, professors generally don't use textbooks much above the 100 level. They select readings, use a combination of books, provide readings from journals, and other material that is substantially more complex and in-depth than what one might get at any school (RA or DETC) using a programmatic approach to teaching with a less selective student population.

I suspect, based on history at degreeinfo, that you are the exception.

I agree with you partially; I think this is a particular problem with the for-profit RA schools that have little to no interest in educational quality, academic rigor, or ongoing research and inquiry. But I don't agree with the "very few" notion; on the contrary, I think it is the large for-profits (and perhaps some nonprofits) that are the worst offenders, but there are plenty of excellent, rigorous DL programs offered by bricks and mortar schools that are equivalent, academically, to some of the best state schools out there. And certainly, before somebody accuses me of putting all schools in a genre together, there are some great for-profits out there as well. But again, DETC has a much wider spectrum of good-to-bad than the regionals do, and this is in part because of their own admission that they consider it their mission to help shady schools reform themselves, so they can't really go out and bitch if people point to this as an indication of why DETC is less respected than RA. Again, this has nothing to do with generational issues, and could be fixed if DETC gave a crap about quality and academic rigor.

In a study conducted at some college recently (I don't have the cite offhand), 60% of students believed that they deserved at least a "B" just for showing up in class, too. God help us if academic quality gets to that point because "students are demanding it and they will represent the major (sic) one day"

I don't know where you get that idea, but it's dead wrong. Distance education at the college and graduate level has been around for a very long time, longer than DETC. Among the first distance learning programs were those that came out of bricks-and-mortar colleges in New York in the mid-1800s, and overseen by the New York regents, and correspondence courses date back further than that, in the 1700s. DETC didn't come along until the 1920s, and when it started, it accredited trade schools, not colleges.

If you're going to make claims to try to defend a position, please at least make sure they're correct. It's this sort of sloppy argumentation, nearly always offered by DETC apologists, that makes people question the quality of DETC programs.

 

I completely agree with your take on miss-representation, by any school, be it NA, DETC or the coveted RA sector.

"There is a pretty strong argument" ?? Well, that's worth nothing. If a DETC or NA school designs their MBA program after the Harvard methodology of teaching, (case study), it is not so wildly unbelievable to think that both programs will produce similar results. We are talking about the "average" American population here, not those who are questionably gifted, or know the "right" people, or have money, ... or any other reason(s) for getting into Harvard (actor/es,the famous, the list goes on). Research, IF done properly, is just research, often spanning well beyond the time that individual students spend at any institution.

I'm referring to all classes were students, make use of textbooks, periodicals, journals, research via the library etc., basic undergraduate level programs. You seem to have blind faith in the quality of tenure track education, that smacks of the generational issues of today.

Again, what makes you think RA is any more difficult then NA/DETC? You have to compare Harvard to NA/DETC? I think you can draw that comparison to 1,000's of RA schools and you MIGHT be right.

Okay, okay, I get it, we can compare 2% of the elite schools with 98% of the attended schools and find differences. Let it go man!

I don't ... but we'll never know if we don't include the "facts" in our arguments, will we?

I tend to agree with you but the issue I'm trying to make here is that there are far too many RA B&M schools out there, reluctantly providing a very poor DL program for their students, because it is the "direction that education is going", not because they have embraced the format. Sad.

Interesting, so am I to believe that 60& of RA B&M students think they deserve a "B" just for showing up? Tells you something about the weaknesses of the traditional way of education these days.

Oh yeah, the industrial revolution didn't start in the 1900's either, should we go back to the Egyptian days and reference the value-added lessons learned back then? We are talking about distance learning with an on line component here, this isn't a history lesson. Again generational thinking is what's holding progress back.

So far, you are isolating yourself, you are clearly not open to change, insulting others is not the way to get your point across, as weak as it appears to be. Let's hope your "good till expiry date" hasn't passed as we work our way through this generationally inhibited period.

 

Chip wrote, "There is a pretty strong argument to be made that research influences the quality of academia, and DETC schools, so far at least, have virtually no research going on. Ergo, RA schools where research is being done may be providing better than DETC schools (or for-profit RA schools where no research is happening.)"

On the doctoral level, it's worth everything. DETC doctoral programs aren't going to be fully competitive in the academic and professional worlds until DETC schools are perceived as advancing scholarship and practice.

On the master's level it's important as well, since masters degrees are supposed to introduce students to the state of the art. So it's going to be very helpful to have professors who are personally familiar with what's happening at that level.

And just in general, an active intellectual life is part of what higher education means, it's something that's vital even on the undergraduate level. If schools show no visible sign of possessing it, then they might not receive as much respect as those that do.

Without getting into arguments about tenure, I do think that a staff of long-term professors who actually use their employer as their institutional affiliation is preferable to an ever-changing lineup of short-term temps. Schools build reputation in significant part by the strengths of their faculty, so there needs to be a faculty list to point to. In DETC's defense, many of their schools do boast stable faculty lists. It's hard to think of any that have notably strong faculties though.

Moving on to your "generational issues of today" remark, whatever that means, it seems to be a non-sequitur despite how many times you return to it. What do generations have to do with DETC schools' relative standing within American higher education? Do you believe that younger academics have higher opinions of DETC and its schools?

I don't know of any evidence of that. If anything the reverse is probably true. In my experience, younger professors are still reverberating from the overwhelming experience of earning their own doctorates. They tend to see all of higher education through that lens. The younger generation of professors is probably going to think most highly of programs similar to their own graduate programs.

Regarding 'difficulty', we need to be talking about individual schools, programs and class sections, not vaguely and generally about accreditors. The accreditors don't teach classes or award degrees.

And what does "NA/DETC" mean? I'm assuming that 'NA' refers to non-RA institutional accreditors. Leaving specialized accreditors out of the discussion, we need to recognize that what's true for DETC schools isn't necessarily true for all non-RA accredited schools. The New York Regents are evidence of that. Graduates of Rockefeller University or the American Museum of Natural History are going to get a very different reception from hiring committees than graduates of Cal Coast or the U. of Atlanta.

This gets us back to the original point about intellectual life. A university hiring committee looking for a faculty member that will raise their department's profile in comparative biology will already be familiar with the AMNH. They will know about its extensive paleontological collections, worldwide expeditions and about its many scholarly publications. They will have good reason to expect that an AMNH graduate will be familiar with advanced developments in these areas.

Your argument up above was "There is rarely a RA student who isn't taking at least one DL course from their school program, and they can thank NA/DETC for the right to be able to accomplish that."

But DETC (not 'NA/DETC') didn't invent or pioneer university level DL. The fact that DL has grown widespread today isn't because of anything that DETC's done.

 

Bill has addressed the majority of your other points quite well, so I'll just say this: If you were to read the 9+ year history of my posts on DegreeInfo (and a.e.d. before that) I think you'd see that I'm extremely open to change, and my views on distance education (and most other things) are constantly evolving based on new information that's coming out.

I believe that the fundamental issues that affects whether or not people value DETC degrees or consider them equivalent to RA degrees has nothing to do with age, as you are clearly implying it does; it has to do with quality and rigor of education, or at least, the perception of quality and rigor.

DETC has a number of duds that it's accredited; one of the worst offenders was ICS (which has subsequently been resold several times and is now Penn-Foster.) This school was (and probably still is) using horribly, horribly outdated materials for educational topics that are changing rapidly, such as IT-related courses, and DETC, as far as anyone can tell, did nothing about it. That's one small example I know of, and I'm sure there are plenty of others.

DETC has also accredited various schools that, until the day they were awarded DETC accreditation, were openly advertising fraudulent accreditation. And for whatever reason, DETC's process does not filter out bogus schools whose academic rigor is nonexistent (I'm talking specialty things like holistic health, where the course materials consist of popular books rather than scientific texts) at an early stage, so we see schools that we know are blatantly substandard making it to a stage of serious consideration. (They often get rejected, but just that they are getting seriously considered instead of rejected outright certainly implies a lower threshold for consideration.

You don't see this happening with the regionals. Their process is more rigorous and so crappy schools don't even make it to candidacy. This and many other things certainly gives the appearance, whether or not it is true, that DETC is inferior in the standards it applies for academic quality and rigor. And DETC knows this (they read DegreeInfo and have heard the criticism in other quarters as well) but they've never made the sligntest noises indicating a desire to raise the bar.

I don't think it's any accident that the regionals, on the whole, even though they are six separate entities, with different policies, interpretations, and processes, all maintain a relatively consistent minimum standard. Of course there's a substantial variation between, say, Harvard or Brown at the top end, and some dinky RA B&M school catering to a largely poorly educated population in some sparsely educated state, and there are likely some "duds" among RA schools that should not be accredited. But the difference is that the RAs eventually revoke accreditation of the bad schools, are public with the process and the reasons for it, and are also more cautious about accrediting DL programs over B&M programs.

And back to the research issue, at schools where professors are doing active research, that research finds its way into the classroom, even in the lowest level classes, if the graduate students and professors they are assisting are teaching the classes. The spirit of academic and scientific inquiry comes across in what students learn, and how topics are approached. Undergraduate education isn't just about learning; it is about teaching people to think critically, to analyze and synthesize data, so that they can apply the techniques of critical analysis and inquiry to other aspects of their lives.

A lot of that process can be lost when teaching is pre-programmed; the piece I think people fail to understand is that at all but the very, very lowest rung RA schools, professors introduce other topics to their students outside the text. This tends to happen less at schools where the professors are not doing research or are actively involved in continued learning in their field. And because DETC schools very rarely have professors involved in research (or at least, research that gets published and shared), the quality of education is different than it is at the majority of RA schools. (This applies equally to RA schools, mostly for-profit schools, where no ongoing research is happening.)

I do believe that the standards for academic quality are slipping nationwide; plagiarism and other forms of academic fraud definitely appear to be increasing at an alarming rate, professors at some schools are told they can only give a certain percentage of failing grades, regardless of the quality of students, and many people don't give a shit. So it is possible that if the quality of education continues to decline, the RA standards will decrease so much that they will begin to equal the DETC standards, and at that point, yes, the two will be equivalent. But I believe there are enough people, of all generations, who care about academic quality and integrity that it will be difficult for that to happen.

Now, that said, I do believe that it is possible for DETC and RA to eventually reach a similar level of quality and acceptability. But that has nothing to do with generational views. For DETC to continue to enhance its reputation among its RA peers, it must start acting like the RAs. DETC needs to start enforcing higher quality standards, and take steps to enhance its perception as well as reality, stop acting as the "Alcoholics Anonymous for accreditation" by accepting shady schools, and start acting like it wants to be treated as a topnotch accreditor.

 

The first university to offer DL degrees is reportedly the University of London which initiated distance education in 1858. Key Facts - University of London - External System

 

I can't speak for the IT courses that are offered by Penn Foster but my textbooks for Business Management/Marketing are 2008 and 2009 respectively.

 

This is good to hear. That may be a problem that no longer exists, especially since the school has been sold 3 or 4 times, and perhaps the current owners understand the value of providing up-to-date materials. While I don't remember any discussions of DETC doing anything to contribute to improving the problem, perhaps they did.