AN accredited degree from Latin America for an Adam Smith University degree?

Oh, the amazing things about higher ed. one can learn on this forum. :jester:
The Internet is indeed a wonderful place. :smile:

Johann

PS - I asked one of my grandkids (9) about Phineas and Ferb. He was too preoccupied with his programming to reply. He has learned Scratch himself and his Dad has taught him Java - and maybe some Python too, IIRC. He likes Wii games, but I haven't seen him watch cartoons in a l-o-n-g time. Maybe he does when I'm not there. Then again, he's got around 500 books in his room -- and no TV there.

Johann

 

Try not to worry, he might still turn out OK.

 

He probably will -- it's his Grandfather I'm worried about! :smile:

Johann

 

Please people, lets not generalize. "Latin America" is not a country - it's a vague concept that englobes numerous countries in North, Central and South America.

So any talk about "how easy" is to set up questionable colleges in "Latin America" is probably bullshit because I doubt who said this knows about the situation in every Latin America country.

About WES: I can only talk about my country, Brazil. In this case I can assure you that WES grants BA equivalence for any 4 year degree from a Ministry of Education authorized school (that's the only way to legally operate a university/college in Brazil). I got my undergrad degree evaluated by them.

 

We know. None of us said otherwise...especially me.

No it isn't bullshit. It's proven to be quite easy, in some Latin American countries - by no means all. The "Private" university laws in specific countries have made it very easy to open a school with pretty well NO oversight - in Mexico, Panama and, lately, Nicaragua.

I could post a list, if you like! There are also some known "rogue" schools in Costa Rica that deal mainly in selling degrees of no standing to foreigners offshore - degrees that they are not allowed to confer in Costa Rica. We know bullshit (and a bad school) when we see it...and we try our best to refrain from adding to it ourselves.

And we also know that Brazil doesn't share these problems... and has distance and B&M schools of very good quality. But thanks for reminding us. :smile:

Johann

 

May be Brazil but not the case for Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, etc.
WES has a list of "recognized" schools from Latin American countries that would be considered equivalent to an RA American school. Not because the minister of education of Mexico (SEP) accredited a school, it would be automatically accepted by WES. Try to get a degree from Universidad Azteca, Universidad Internacional or any other mickey mouse school and try to get it recognized by WES and let us know if you were lucky enough to get the RA equivalent status.

By the way, not because WES gives its blessing it means that an American employer would recognize it. WES is accepted by Universities, federal government, etc but also I would be very surprised if you are offered a tenure track position based on a degree from a low tier school in Nicaragua that made it to be equivalent to RA. Most American employers would also look at the credibility of the institution and country that accredited the degree.

The point we are trying to make is that not because the degree is accredited in a country, it makes it automatically acceptable for a person trying to use it in the US, Europe, Australia or Canada.

Many people come to this forum and ask for advice about a very cheap degree from an obscure university that was found over the internet that claims accreditation from a country with lax standards. Many times the schools is indeed accredited but some people don't understand that in some countries this accreditation doesn't guarantee certain quality standards.

 

Granted, Steve - but AFAIK, degrees of the controversial "private" universities of Panama, Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and yes - even some in squeaky-clean, ultra-efficient Switzerland - that we've cussed-and-discussed at DI, mostly don't work IN THEIR OWN COUNTRIES - no standing there at all, usually. That's different to just "not working" in the US.

It's not fit for fishwrap! In the DL fora, the usual suspects/gurus have unmasked and thoroughly trashed arrant & egregious mills on this list, from the South Pacific to Central Africa. Bad schools trumpet their UNESCO recognition as if it were Holy Writ. Sadly, it's all they have. Part of the scam! :sad:

Johann

 

But sometimes, it does. E.G Breyer State. Its US degrees are meaningless, and so are the ones it now prints in Panama.

Johann

"The Japanese are coming, so we must become the Japanese." - The late Jack Tramiel, of Commodore and Atari fame.
"Breyer State is coming, so we must become Breyer State." - Unknown rubber-stamper of Panama's education permits.

 

I'm going with Johann on this one. As Rich as pointed out in the past, degrees are supposed to represent something of substance. If some other country honors the piece of paper as it would a degree from a legitimate school (and they would do so only out of ignorance) then I suppose you could say that such a degree is "useful" but only in the sense that a lie might be useful.

 

I'm not really into the whole degree mill, who's legit and who's not, thing (although I can play the game on an ametuer level). However, just paying marginal attention to these issues as they arise makes me think that the UNESCO guide has a lot of holes in it. These are inaccuracies that make certain entities appear to be legit when they really are not. As a result, whenever someone says, "Well, my school is legit because it's in the UNESCO guide," I automatically assume the following:

1) The school is bogus because if the UNESCO guide is the only thing they can point to to try to prove their point then,

2) They've lost all their previous arguments and they're terribly desperate

but that's just me.

 

Totally Agreed with Steve.


"I don't think we're disagreeing. I think it's dumb that countries use the UNESCO list for anything, but at the same time if you're in such a country, well, that's probably what you're going to use as your metric of utility."

 

Well, here are a couple of examples that may or may not fit that paradigm, engadnan.

From Ansted University, the British Virgin Islands nonentity:

"The UNESCO recognition of Ansted University mission and activities are one special achievement we should all be proud of."

From Euclid University, debunked herein several times:

As stated by the United Nations (Office of Human Resources Management): "both IAU/UNESCO and the UN Secretariat recognize Euclide- Pole Universitaire Euclide and the other four UN institutions ... as being accredited" (0218/RCA/MP/ONU-12, dated 10 December 2012).

IIRC, Dr. John Bear made a field-trip and wrote that the administrator of Euclid (Bangui, Central African Republic)worked from his residence, "a very nice double-wide" in Trinidad, California. Oh yes, here it is: http://www.degreeinfo.com/general-distance-learning-discussions/40970-instant-help-needed-re-trinidad-calif.html

And no, we don't need any more threads on Ansted or Euclid. We have quite enough. If these are the sort of "schools" UNESCO endorses in its publications -- then I've had quite enough of UNESCO. :sad:

Johann

 

Why? For example, Central African Republic has one "real" university - University of Bangui - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
So nobody (other than Euclid itself) has any real reason to refer to a UNESCO list to attempt justification of EUCLID U's existence, do they?

Johann

BTW - BVI, home of Ansted U., have no bona-fide universities. US Virgin Islands have one. All BVI have in the way of higher ed. is a bunch of lawyers in Tortola, creating IBCs (International Business Corporations) for their clients, at maybe $1200 apiece. Some of these IBCs are called "Universities". All such IBC-Universities are a RACKET, plain and simple.

 

I lied...

Too fast. Although (as I said) BVI appears to have no home-grown B&M universities, it does have a group of University of West Indies students (17 of them at last report) studying in one location -- I believe in Tortola.

Also, University of Calgary (Alberta Canada) is planning a "field school" in BVI during 2013. Neither of these legit. academic activities alters anything I said about the numerous "IBC-Universities" spawned here.

Johann

 

That it does.

But an even bigger problem might how lots of people, many of them professional educators and HR people, seem to misunderstand and misuse the UNESCO listings.

One problem that often pops up on the internet discussion boards is the assumption that the American-style practice of institutional accreditation is general and worldwide. There's an assumption that entire universities are the things being accredited, and that universities are either accredited or else they aren't. So if a degree is awarded by a university that's listed as having accreditation, it's assumed that the degree in question is accredited.

In reality, many countries appear to employ programmatic accreditation. Depending on the country, private higher education institutions may be relatively easy to set up. The new school needn't have the kind of facilities, finances and faculties that Americans or Europeans would expect. The best analogy here is probably with California-style state-approval. Then many of these (sometimes rather small and minimal) schools will submit individual programs to the local accreditor. (Sometimes that's a public office, other times it's the country's flagship national university or perhaps some government recognized autonomous body). So it's entirely normal for schools in countries like Mexico and Central America to simultaneously offer both accredited and non-accredited degrees. In Mexico some degree programs at a particular school might have official recognition (RVOE it's called), while others don't.

Unfortunately, a few of the more financially desperate and less scrupulous schools out there will get one or two local B&M programs accredited (often a bachelors program in business or something), then once the school's name has appeared in the UNESCO listing, the school will sell an overseas entrepeneur the right to offer "international" doctorates (they always seem to be English-language internet doctorates) in the university's name, despite these grandiose new programs having no recognition at all in the country where the degrees are ostensibly awarded. But the awarding university's name is printed there in the UNESCO book, a listing that allows the entrepeneur's overseas marketing to boast that the doctoral degrees that he awards are "RA equivalent" and what Degreeinfo calls "GAAP".

I don't want to criticise this Latin-American-style programmatic accreditation practice (at least some of Latin America, I know that Mexico and Costa Rica do things this way). Like everything else, it has strengths and weaknesses. One advantage over American-style institutional accreditation is that these Latin accreditors actually look closely at individual programs. They want to see the program syllabi, they want to know who is going to be teaching classes and what their qualifications are. In the US, the institutional accreditation practice is more along the lines of requiring sound finances and a functioning university administration, then allowing that administration lots of flexibility in hiring faculty and designing content as it sees fit. And that freedom might sometimes result in problems and abuses occurring here as well. It's certainly why specialized programmatic accreditors have flourished here in the States, alongside the institutional accreditors.

Of course, other problems with the UNESCO listing are a lot more basic and elemental. The fact is that many countries don't have any functioning domestic higher-education quality assurance (accreditation) system at all. So UNESCO has little choice in these cases but to list any university that possesses whatever minimal government approvals are necessary in places where no additional oversight exists.

Occasionally governments will actually promise off-shore entrepeneurs that they will forward a new school's name to UNESCO and to the World Health Organization sight-unseen, before the entrepeneur has even agreed to open his school on their territory. The governments think of the promises as economic development incentives. (We've seen this happening with a few of the Caribbean off-shore medical schools.)

And there are even more spectacular cases where individual countries might be devastated by civil war, by political instability and may even be failed-states. Government ministry approvals for entrepeneurs hoping to operate off-shore schools flying the counntry's flag might be available to anyone who bribes the right officials. (Registering foreign-owned ships can be lucrative, so why not universities?) So even if an accreditation system ostensibly exists on paper, there's no guarantee that it's running effectively. Many of us still recall the St. Regis University episode of a few years ago in which some American con-artists (some of whom subsequently went to prison) were boasting that their Liberian accreditation (that they had simply purchased from corrupt officials) represented "RA equivalence". This was happening while Liberia's own domestic universities were merely burned-out looted shells. The regime that sold that wonderful "accreditation" was subsequently forced from power and its former president was arrested as a war-criminal.

Me too.

The UNESCO listing is useful, I don't really want to dismiss it. Like everything else, it has its strengths and weaknesses. It gives readers a rough-and-ready picture of individual countries' higher-education systems and university lineups. My misgivings arise when lazy and clueless admissions officers and HR people start to treat the UNESCO list as if it was divine revelation, as a substitute for critical thought as opposed to being an occasion when critical thinking is necessary.

 

Right. Exactly what happened with UNEM -Universidad Nacional de Empresas - Costa Rica. Threads abound!

Traditionally, the big players in ship-registration (and "second" passports) have been Panama, Liberia and, to a lesser extent (mainly extra passports) Honduras and Costa Rica. It is interesting to note that three of those countries have now "graduated" to accommodating "Private" Universities, some (but not all) offering either:

1. "Legal" degrees of no standing in the country of origin or anywhere else, e.g. Breyer State U., Panama

2. Degrees (usually via foreign entrepreneur) beyond those allowed in-country, e.g. Universidad National de Empresas (UNEM), Costa Rica

3. Outright sale of government accreditation, e.g. St. Regis U. & Robertstown U. - Liberia

Mine, too. My misgivings also arise when a school treats the list as if it were divine revelation, in its advertising. Must be getting old. I think I said that before - oh yes, I did too...

I think we're all pretty much in agreement on the pitfalls of the UNESCO list - and thanks to Bill's detailed explanation, we know how those ...umm, "pitfalls" sometimes come about.

Johann