California Coast University Doctor of Education

California Coast University was one of those well known unaccredited schools for a long time. A few well known people graduated from it over the course of its history (eg Walter Martin, Ben Bova). Don't hear much about it anymore.

It became DEAC accredited and was eventually approved to offer the Doctor of Education and now offers three EdD's (Administration, Educational Psychology, and Organizational Leadership).

Relatively affordable. If you are military, veteran, first responder (etc), doctoral tuition is $288 per unit. With transfer credit about $16,000 and change.

Not sure of marketability (probably depends on setting).

Do we have anyone here who has taken classes or graduated?

https://www.calcoast.edu/

 

One of my coworkers is working on the M.Ed there. She likes that it is self paced but also low cost per credit. I looked into it but didn’t like the lack of resources for students and lack of instruction. You basically read books and write papers.

 

Thank you. Yes. From what I could work out a doctoral class was about 60 plus pages of research writing along with proctored midterm and final exams (based on texts, notes, research, etc).

 

Back in the day--a very long time ago--CCU was pretty sketchy. Originally named California Western University (after an accredited school abandoned the name), the quality of work of its students wasn't very good. And it stayed unaccredited for a very long time. But...

There was a sudden turn-around in the early 1980s. Back then, California had a 3-tier system for recognizing schools. The first was Accredited. If a school was accredited by a recognized agency, the state didn't do much in the way of oversight.

The second was Approved. This was actually programmatic approval, where the state would apply a somewhat rigorous process in evaluating each program at a school.

The third, and easiest to obtain, was Authorized. Essentially, anyone could get a license to operate a degree-granting university by submitted an application that attested to 13 areas of operation and a statement that the owner(s) had $50,000 of assets towards the operation of the school. The idea was to keep the fly-by-night diploma mills out with that $50K requirement, but the state was pretty loose with what qualified towards the amount--and didn't do much checking anyway. Thus, by the end of the 1970s, the state had dozens of schools operating at the Authorized level, and it was hard to tell the difference between the diploma mills and legitimate efforts at running a nontraditional university.

Because of this, unaccredited schools who were Authorized as degree-granting institutions might have one or more of their degree programs Approved by the state.

CCU was in that Authorized category. Until it wasn't. CCU was the first non-residential, unaccredited school in California to have all of its degree programs at all levels--bachelor's through the doctorate--Approved by the state. (Across several disciplines: Business, IT, Education, and Psychology.) Things stayed that way through the abolition of the Authorized category, where the state moved to approve all unaccredited schools. (It did a lousy job when it suddenly had dozens of schools to approve that it conveniently ignored for decades.) Many schools closed, some moved their degree licensure to other states (Hawaii was popular), but they often just stayed put. (Kennedy-Western did this.) CCU did not because all of its programs were already Approved. From about 1982 through 2004 things stayed the same. Then DETC came along.

CCU was accredited by DETC in early 2005. To get accredited, CCU had to drop its doctoral programs for two years. DETC had (has?) a rule that a school wanting to offer doctorates had to be accredited for at least two years. Schools offering them had to drop them to get accredited. Later, CCU got approval to start offering professional doctorates (but not scholarly ones like the PhD). This is how things are now.

I've written in the past about the value of considering going to a DEAC-accredited school to earn a professional doctorate, especially for those who want to contribute to the practice of their profession and do not intend to pursue an academic career relying upon it. I still feel that way. If you decided to pursue such a goal, CCU seems to be a reasonable place to do it.

 

One thing about cost. It looks like it costs about $US20K to do a doctorate at CCU. If cost is a serious issue, you can beat that elsewhere. But it's not bad.

 

Definitely true! Unless you absolutely need their payment structure, I think there are a lot of better options out there.

 

What are a couple of schools that are less expensive for an accredited doctorate than CCU?

 

These might cost a little more, but are a better program overall:

For a Doctor in Business Adminstration: https://www.columbiasouthern.edu/online-degree/view-all-programs/doctorate/dba/
$435 per credit but they also off discounts for the military, first responders, etc.


American College of Education has several doctoral degrees for $23,914 and a much more respected in the field of Education. They also have discounts for military, first responders, etc.
https://ace.edu/programs/doctoral/


I would choose either of those schools over calcoast. I am sure there are more.

 

Cal Coast is $320 per credit hour at the doctoral level. Minus the discount it rings in at $288.
But....it is DEAC (which you need to take into account).

 

California had some innovative unaccredited schools back in the day. Before my time but that hippie experimental education.

In one sense, the various schools of Psychology and law served a purpose. The law schools helped people become lawyers (albeit low numbers) and people did become Psychologists. In fairness, if you could pass the Psych Boards you obviously learned something.

All that experimental stuff has generally given way to a bunch of for profit schools offering expensive MBAs, DBA's, PhDs in Leadership and so on.

Perhaps I am over romanticizing the California Approved and Authorized era. Not sure any other State duplicated it (many others had unaccredited schools but not the same type). Something in the California culture. Even Columbia Pacific University in it's early days seemed to be offering something credible. It could be done affordably and with some substance to it.

 

It wasn't before my time, but that simple statement captures much of what was going on. But not all.

Many of the more experimental, honest efforts at creating "new wave" schools succeeded. Schools like CIIS, Fielding, and Saybrook survived and thrived. But not all, as the example you cite below.

A few of the more businesslike ventures survived, but not many. Some, like CCU, underwent serious internal restructuring. Some were bought out and converted, like Pacific Western. Still others, like SCUPS, hung in there and made it. But most (eventually) disappeared with the elimination of the three-tier structure. Kensington, Frederick Taylor, Golden State, Kennedy-Western, etc.

Also out went the diploma mills.

It isn't clear how many people actually earned law or psychology licenses through these schools. But a lot--A LOT--of people took master's degrees in counseling and got licensed at that level through unaccredited (state-approved) programs.

I'm not sure I'd call out those degrees as unique. But yes, the genre of schools we're talking about have been replaced by the for-profits.

The main dynamic is two-fold. First, the elimination of the three-tiered system got rid of a lot of bad schools. Second, schools offering credible distance learning began getting greater access to and opportunities for recognized accreditation.

Oh, if anyone is guilty of that, it's me. It was a fascinating era being on the cusp of an educational revolution.

While some other states saw some unaccredited, nontraditional schools pop up, no where else saw what I think was a revolution. This, IMHO, was due to a unique blend of population, wealth, a laissez-fair structure of higher education that permitted experimentation (and, as a result, tolerated both the avant garde and the spurious), and the "counter-culture culture" that is my home state.

I have to disagree with the tone of the first part of that statement. Columbia Pacific offered "something credible" throughout its history, not just in "its early days." (Disclosure: CPU co-owner, Dick Crews, MD, was on my doctoral committee at Union.)

CPU's main problem was its success. As an unaccredited, distance learning school operating at the Authorized level, CPU became huge. In my opinion, a lot of people did good work there. But the quality could vary as people did degrees in just about anything. When the state transitioned to institutional approval, it was utterly unprepared bureaucratically to do so. Instead, it sought out a sacrificial lamb in CPU. Naturally, the state had no trouble finding flawed degrees, like a doctoral dissertation written in Spanish with no one on the committee fluent in that language. (John Bear reports of similar skeleton's in another school's closet, a school now accredited by DEAC. It happens.)

Anyway, the state moved to shut down CPU, which it eventually did. And then, poof! The state's role dried right up. There was no second CPU-style closing. They bagged their trophy kill and went home, leaving the rest of the schools to market forces. I contend that the rapid availability of recognized accreditation for DL schools--brought on by the Carnegie Commission and turbo-charged by DEAC--killed the market for unaccredited schools. I also contend that, except for a few niche areas, there really is no reason anymore to attend an unaccredited school, except for a school obviously in pre-accredited status with serious aims at accreditation. (Disclosure: I was for several years on the board of directors of one such school, the Western Institute for Social Research, and I remain as an informal advisor to them to this day as they strive towards recognized accreditation.)

Someone ought to write a book....

 

Thanks Rich for the thorough answer and thoughts.

 

I think those payment structures (have seen various schools use them) aren't quite what they seem in that you can't finish in the minimum amount of time and have paid off the tuition in for example four years (@ 150 a month). You would need to either make a balloon payment or continue paying after you had finished the degree requirements.

Still does make it accessible for some people.

 

If I recall correctly, you can keep making those payments but wont get your degree officially until it’s paid off. My coworker likes it…. I think it all seems kinda hokey.

 

This is true of every college or university I've ever heard of. You have to clear your account before you get your degree issued.

When I was a kid, before the "big box" stores became common and credit cards became ubiquitous , it was common for our local stores to get in certain items on a hit-and-miss basis. Parents, who were often living check-to-check, would see something they wanted to purchase--a bike, maybe--and they'd put it on "lay away." That way, the merchant would hold the item until it was paid off. During the lay-away, the item was retained by--and owned by--the merchant until it was paid off.

Your degree is on lay-away. You can pay the balance with cash or credit, however, and get your diploma and transcript.

(I got that bike. From Pep Boys, of all places.)

 

When I completed my B.S. in CJ at Ashworth in April 2014, I didn't pay off my balance until April 2016. By then, I had finished my MBA at Don Bosco University.

 

Hmmm degree by layaway. I like it. Has marketing potential. Only 60 more payments and the transcript is yours.

 

And it makes those resume and LinkedIn statements about "Degree expected [date]" at lot more meaningful. And accurate.

 

Another nice thing about lay-aways -- no interest. I'm all for that! (Islamic finance course.)

 

Some layaway plans did/do charge interest, IIRC. Not very much, but certainly more than simply purchasing the thing outright.