California Coast University Credit Transfer

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by Cameron, Aug 31, 2019.

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  1. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

    You don't know me so don't even go there. I am here, unlike others, not to push my own agenda but to let lurkers know that there are other options besides RA or the highway or Rich Douglas' way. I have been silent towards you and Levicoff for the 15 years I've been on this forum. But no more. You both have agendas that you push incessantly and if someone disagrees with you, then you both bully them into submission. I have no idea why some posters kowtow to you and Levicoff. You're both stuck in the past. So take your victim quote and well, you know what you can do with it.
     
  2. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    When getting an education it is generally better to get the degree that will have the most utility. The credits that will most likely transfer. That means that regional accreditation is generally better than going to a nationally accredited school. People looking into schools to go to should understand that. Clouding that issue is doing them a disservice.
     
  3. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    Hmmmm . . . sounds like a declaration of war. I'm afraid, however, that I must decline your gracious invitation - For someone to be my adversary, they must be worthy enough to be my adversary. And you, I'm afraid, are unworthy. At least until you learn the proper format for quoting with attribution on this forum. Besides, as good as you are at general advice - and you are good at that - you are still anonymous (with your most recent post, I could say that you're an anonymous troll).

    Besides, I never bully anyone - I merely laugh at them. That's far more effective than bullying could ever be.

    Warm regards.
     
  4. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    I think that generally speaking, programmatic accreditation is important if not essential in most fields in which one must be licensed.
     
  5. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    There are, indeed, but most of your list would not fit that bill.

    The list you copied here includes at least three institutional accreditors and a handful of university associations that, if they do provide any sort of accreditation, it isn't in any way "essential" to those fields. And I've never heard of anyone hiring someone with a degree in CS and insisting it be accredited by CSAC.

    And I don't want to speak broadly about the field of culinary arts but aside from, possibly, teaching I'm not sure how important programmatic accreditation would be for the typical practitioner compared to, say, nurses and teachers and therapists.
     
  6. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    The biggest defect that I see in the never-ceasing "RA vs NA" rhetoric is its dependence on an implicit but rarely stated premise that RA schools are academically superior to NA schools, that they provide better instruction, produce more competent graduates or whatever. But nobody, to my knowledge, has ever convincingly made that case.

    My own impression is that at the undergraduate level, quality of education is mostly a function of 1. the individual faculty member teaching a class, and 2. course design. (That latter takes on more importance with DL.) And we know that just at RA schools, both of those things can be all over the map. Classes can range from less than worthless to life-changing (in a good way). I'm not aware of any convincing evidence that teaching and course design are consistently worse at NA schools.

    Institutional accreditation seems to concern itself more with finances and administrative procedures then with course content and educational outcomes.

    That being said, lots of people out there swallow the implicit premise whole. I think that's probably more common in academia (infested as it is with PhDs who typically view all of higher education through the warped lens of their own graduate school experience) than it is in the world of real life employment.

    I agree that it's probably helpful for Degreeinfo to alert prospective students of 'NA's' possible utility and transfer-acceptability defects. (It would help a lot though, if we really had some hard data and knew how large and widespread these defects are.) And however large they are, these defects again seem to be based on simply assuming the truth of the implicit 'NA academic inferiority' premise up above.

    But other than pointing out possible utility defects, if somebody nevertheless continues to like a particular 'NA' program and thinks that it's a good choice given their own personal situation, they may well be right.

    Trying to ridicule and insult students and graduates of NA institutions into crawling away in humiliation is just counterproductive bullshit.
     
    Last edited: Sep 3, 2019
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  7. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Around here, the discussion should be focused on the utility of credits and degrees from DEAC-accredited schools. Everything else just clouds the issue without adding value.
     
  8. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Which is why I've never commented substantially on it. My take has always been about the utility of credits and degrees from such schools, something that can be measured...which I did.

    Following Bourdieu's capital theory, one gives a school two forms of capital and receives two. The two one gives are money and academic effort. The two one receives are credits/degrees and an education. It is this last one that I've been interested in. Given that there are more than 4,000 degree-granting tertiary institutions in the U.S. alone, most situations where a degree is being judged do not involve an actual evaluation of the educative process one has endured. If they do anything, they go to a resource and look up the school to see if its accreditation is acceptable to them. And that's where things break down.

    It is undeniable that degrees from DEAC-accredited schools are acceptable in fewer situations. There is not--nor will there ever be--a situation where a degree from such a school would be acceptable, yet one from an RA school would not. But the reverse is sometimes true.

    The real question is much more personal, however, Is that degree useful to you and your situation? And will that reliably be the case in the future?

    As for trying to judge the quality of the educative process of a school by the form of its accreditation, no thanks. I don't think the correlation is there, and I know it hasn't been demonstrated.

    Oh, and if you (not you personally, but generally) are tempted to toss me into the "RA or no way" bunch, don't. I think the question is far to complex to take broad assessments and apply them to individual situations. For example, I've advocated positively for the DEAC-accredited professional doctorate, because I think it makes great sense. So there.
     
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  9. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    Or just nationally accredited schools in general. I agree, it should be. This board more than any other should also be a lot more measured and reasonable in dealing with this topic, and although I think has gotten better it still has a long way to go.

    I can understand Reddit or some random place having people who don't know better popping up to shame others over a legitimately earned college degree (just saying that sounds ridiculous because there is zero shame in that), but this is the one place where people should know better. The take that this accreditor or that school is mickey-mouse may be true, I won't even dispute that, but those things can be said about certain schools and accreditors across all accreditation types, and I'm certain that an operation like say, Penn Foster/Ashworth College is a larger operation than some regionally accredited schools that are discussed favorably here, even bigger now since Penn Foster bought Ashworth. So at that point, the discussion comes down to rigor, but who really knows for sure the difference between one NA school and another RA school in that regard, if any? Who is examining this? No one as far as I know. Comparing my own NA program studies to my RA program studies, I found no notable differences in quality, and the only real difference was that the NA program was 100% self-paced whereas the RA programs were served on a weekly system, but even that's changed since as far as I can tell many if not most DEAC programs now only offer weekly class structures.

    Once rigor can't be determined, then we've got utility and credit transfer, but over the years both of those appear to have changed for the better for NA schools and I think it has a lot to do with just the fact that online education has become more and more accepted. I put it that way because I know when I first started with online education people weren't giving out frowns and strange looks and making negative statements because of the accreditor as the first online program I dealt with was regionally accredited, it was the fact that it was online that made people frown and pass judgments.
     
  10. Lerner

    Lerner Well-Known Member

    Absolutely and this is what I meant by using the word properly accredited.
    And today more than ever there are more DL offerings of properly accredited degree programs.
    As was mentioned earlier flexibility and utility of the degree earned is achieved by earning the degree from name recognized university from properly accredited RA+ Programmatic.
    NA + Programmatic is obviously better than only NA but still will have less utility.
    Let's say you want to work overseas, many evaluation services overseas, be it run by the ministry of education or sponsored/recognized agencies will not evaluate NA degrees.
    NARIC UK simply states that there is multiple accreditations services in the US, they consider only US RA degrees comparable to UK degrees.
    In Canada, I hear mixed reviews. Some state NA is not fully recognized.
    But here in the US as mentioned earlier by members more experienced in this field than I the utility varies.
     
  11. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

    Agreed. What I have an issue with is when someone creates a post about an NA school, which in this case is California Coast, and asks how they can transfer their credits to an RA school and then an RA vs. NA discussion begins ad nauseam. Well, to use country terminology, the horse is already out of the barn. It does no good for any of us to go down the rabbit hole of RA vs. NA when this person is looking for answers to their particular situation. That, good sir, is indeed a disservice to them.
     
  12. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

    While it's not on the level of UT Arlington, Colorado State University - Global Campus will accept credits from California Coast University. You can plug your credits into Transferology to see which colleges might accept your credits. Only CSU Global and CSU Pueblo came up when I tested one course from CCU. CSU Global also has a tool on its website that lets you choose a school and see how courses have transferred in so far.

    https://www.transferology.com/index.htm
    https://csuglobal.edu/admissions/transfer-info/transfer-evaluation-system
     
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  13. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    My concern is not for Cameron. His horse is indeed out of the barn. Cameron is a good example though for people reading this thread now and latter that are searching for classes to enroll in. It would be a grave disservice to them if they were not warned and instead left with the impression that NA credits and degrees always had the same utility as RA credits and degrees.

    I would even venture to assert that the vast majority of people getting that kind of information from Degreeinfo.com never post anything on this forum and instead just do their research more passively.
     
  14. sideman

    sideman Well Known Member

    That is indeed evident here Bill. Your concern is to push your own agenda. You are aware that there are other subheaders in this forum that address the RA vs. NA argument. And in fact you can start your own post and you and everyone else that wishes to discuss this can do so to their heart's content. I can provide a link if you like.

    In regards to the 2nd highlighted area, I would say that most people that come here can and do think for themselves and their own personal situation and don't accept advice without consideration of the source. And they just might even be more open-minded than some of the posters on this forum and do current research instead of relying on decades old statistics. And in fact they may even wonder why we frequent posters can't reach a common ground on such a dull and insipid topic. Yes Bill, there may be a few people out there just as I've described. But they'd certainly be hard pressed to find good counsel like that in Degree info, advice that's even handed and persons that can weigh both sides. I'm not saying that it's completely absent but it's sure tough to come by here anymore.
     
  15. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    I think I’ll play philosopher for a few moments. After all, I have a Doctor of Philosophy degree, which is, of course, the best of all doctorates (a subtle snip towards those who want to waste their time on a DBA or similar ilk).

    First of two philosophical points: Let’s say that I am a conscientious objector. I oppose war, and would never have fought in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. However, I would have fought in World War II, because everyone knows that was “the good war.” The war against Hitler.

    Well, guess what, kiddies . . . My local draft board would not recognize me as a conscientious objector. You, see, to legally qualify as a C.O., you have to be against all wars, even “the good one.” If you would have fought Hitler but not other despots, you are not legally a C.O.

    Second example, speaking of Hitler. Let’s say that you are against capital punishment. Would you have executed Hitler? Or, say, Charles Manson? Or Timothy McVeigh? Or Dylann Roof?

    If you’re 100% against capital punishment but would have executed any of them, then you are inconsistent in your opposition to capital punishment. To truly oppose it 100%, you must be against it totally, which means that it would be cool to toss Hitler into a jail cell for the rest of his life. But not to execute him.

    Now, I have stood for some 30 years against recommending NA programs as opposed to RA programs. There are some NA programs, in fact, that I like – but I will never publicly recommend one. Because I want to communicate a consistent stand that RA is better than NA.

    And the proof of that is this very thread. Bill Huffman noted that his interest goes beyond the simple question presented by Cameron in the first post, and I quite agree – my interest extends to everyone who will pop into this thread because they’re browsing DI and are interested in the thread title. And they’re wondering the same thing that Cameron was wondering.

    And to me, the key issue is that for whatever the reason may be, Cameron felt the need to raise his question in the first place.

    The point of my “RA or the highway” position is quite simple – life is full of options. And when you go the NA route, you are definitely limiting your options to some degree. Granted, you may not want to continue for a master’s or doctorate today, but you may want to do so at some point. And if you have gone the RA route, you won’t feel the need to make a “Shit, what do I do now?” thread at DI.

    I have also consistently taken a stand against strictly online schools, for-profit schools, and doctorate du jour degrees in leadership. Want to know why? All you have to do is read LadyExecutive’s memoir at https://www.degreeinfo.com/index.php?threads/if-i-could-live-my-life-over-again.53227/.

    I take these positions 100%, recognizing that there are always going to be exceptions. Certainly, one of the best examples of an exception is Chrisjm18, who topped his DEAC-accredited undergrad credentials with an India-based MBA, parlayed that into an RA MS from Lamar, and is now enrolled in an RA Ph.D. program. If you go back to his early posts you can read about his journey, during which he considered several alternate doctoral titles like the DCJ before making the smart move and going for a Ph.D. He took his time, got to know the system and all of his options, and ended up making a logical decision. And, today, even Chris is the first to say that he would (1) avoid for-profit programs and (2) avoid NA programs.

    There are lots of examples here on DI of people who screwed up. Over the years, there have been examples of people that erned mickey-mouse credentials, then went back and subsequently earned RA credentials.

    I like to catch people before they make mistakes. And that means having a 100% consistent position. Anecdotally, I find that the people who are most offended by my position are those with an NA history who are loathe to admit that they screwed up. You, know, the people that I laugh at. Am I concerned with their offense? Nah . . .
     
  16. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    At some point, changing times and situations have to be acknowledged, otherwise even good intention morphs into disservice. Consistency is great, but an unwillingness to change or modify a position when the time/situation calls for it just so one can maintain consistency on that position becomes counterproductive to the main aim of helping others.

    There is no reason why someone cannot have the stance that RA is a better route than NA and to take that position strongly while presenting the exact reasons why, and pointing out the possibility of utility issues is at the top of the list. It's the unnecessary ridicule that goes along with it that distorts the effectiveness of the message.
     
  17. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    I assume this is in jest, but other readers may not understand that.

    First, there is the traditional difference between a scholarly doctorate (the PhD) that advances theory, either by creating it or testing it, and a professional doctorate (like the DBA) that advances praxis. These degrees are generally considered equal. However, the PhD can preponderate in academia because it is focused on scholarship, not praxis. But there are plenty of examples of scholars holding professional doctorates, so I'm not sure that holds much water.

    Then there's the situation where the degrees are actually equal. IIRC, Harvard created its DBA because it only awarded the PhD in arts and sciences, not in professional areas. But the DBA has the requirement for scholarly research comparable to the PhD. Many schools award the DBA, EdD, etc. even though these programs are identical to PhD programs. Anthony Peña used to remind readers on this board of that fact. (At one time, Walden University awarded either title--your choice--for the exact same curriculum.)

    Then there are schools who consider the non-PhD doctorate equal to the PhD. This is true at the University of Leicester. The Doctor of Social Science is a scholarly degree, despite the alternate title. It has that title because of its "taught" component (curriculum of courses), not because it is not scholarly. (The PhD is awarded for the thesis only, while the DSocSci requires two years of coursework plus a thesis.) The University explicitly states that the DSocSci is equal to the PhD.

    In sum, there is no reason to think that doctorates with alternative titles like the DBA are in any way inferior to the PhD.
     
  18. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Unfortunately, no one has done any published research in this area for a decade and a half. We don't know if the gap between degrees from RA schools and non-RA schools regarding the acceptability of their degrees is closing, nor to what extent.

    I agree with Steve that it is undeniable that degrees from non-RA schools can be less useful. The trick is to know if that will affect you, the individual, now or at some time in the future. His point--and I share this--is that you might have a handle on this question now, but it is hard to tell what the future will bring.

    All other things being equal, I would advise pursuing one's degree from a regionally accredited school. But they're not always equal, so individuals might make an individual case for taking a degree from a non-RA school.

    But this is true of almost any decision along these lines. When I enrolled at Union, there were only a handful of regionally accredited (or candidate) short-residency doctoral programs. Union, International Graduate School, Fielding, Sarasota, and Saybrook. That was the list. If you wanted a doctorate from a better school than could be found on that meager list, you had to make life-changing choices. So I chose Union. Would I make the same decision today? (Assuming Union was the same school, which it most certainly is not!) I don't know, but I doubt it. I chose Union because I could do it; I got hooked on person-centered graduate education later. Today there are literally hundreds of choices (including overseas schools). I chose Union despite its limited reputation (it was literally unknown).
     
  19. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Why though?

    You have a better chance at getting DEAC credits to transfer then you do credits from a portfolio evaluation from the Big Three. I've transferred NA credits into schools that refused to even look at ACE Recommended credits.

    Why don't we do a really deep dive into the limitations of the big three? We know that people have found their way into law schools and medical schools with non-RA degrees. We have fewer examples of people with RA degrees awarded based on non-traditional credits.

    It is quite possible that someone with an Ashworth or Aspen programmatically accredited BSN could apply and be accepted into a medical school while that same school would deny a TESC grad, not on the basis of accreditation, but on the manner in which certain course credit was awarded.

    We don't really know.

    But in not knowing that and in just assuming a blanket rule of "RA always" we could potentially be setting someone up for an admissions showdown.

    All I'm saying is that we fall back on "safe" assumptions that, in a landscape as broad as U.S. academia, may not be as safe as we like to believe.
     
  20. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    Overall, we don't, but some of the progress that has been made over the years with NA schools attaining programmatic accreditation that was historically only granted to RA schools, and some major universities openly accepting NA credits, makes me feel that a new examination is worthwhile.
     

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