Unaccredited degree assembled from courses at accredited schools

I suppose it wouldn't be that hard for undergrad, depending on the NA receiving school and its transfer limit policiess etc. RA credits to NA school would be much less of a problem than the reverse. Same, I'd think, applies to grad - except transfer limits would usually be much lower.

 

Because the fake degree aspect of the conversation was covered quickly and completely?

 

Honestly, they might want to look at these as some kind of legit solutions for alternative solutions. There are a lot of schools that use Straighterline and Skillsoft courses in their curriculum. Penn State University uses Straighterline's College Algebra course as its own. Western Governors University and Fort Hays State University use skillsoft courses for their IT and programming curriculum.

 

Right. These are courses approved for credit towards degrees at properly-accredited schools. As you say, legit solutions. What's being offered by World University is not that. It's a flat-out unauthorized degree, Period. And no authority will likely care that some really decent courses are included if the diploma is worthless.

Those good, well-recognized courses can get a person seeking education something way better than a "degree-looking paper" from World U. And they should...

 

And that World U. "diploma." Looks like something from Cafe Press. Abide U. does better - free. All the proof I need that Dudeism works.

 

To be fair to World U, although its degrees are fake (rather than saying they are unaccredited, I should have been more explicit in acknowledging they have no degree-granting authority which is a step down into the dirt), they are also free. It doesn't appear to cost anything to become a "student" or to receive a "diploma." Especially if you audit the courses for free at the partner schools.

 

People would be better off doing a 'challenge' like Scott Young did:

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/

Not only did he learn a ton from taking a bunch of MOOCs, but he built up a huge following on his blog about 'ultralearning', gave a TED talk, did numerous podcast & TV news program interviews, and even released a few books about his year-long learning adventure.

That's worth a heck of a lot more than some dubious 'diploma'.

 

Cost-free, but not necessarily consequence-free.

 

I thought you had made that very clear in your opening post.

Unaccredited but real degrees have a big problem. That problem is that many will consider the degree a worthless diploma mill degree simply because they don't understand. So it means that a resume may be turned down by HR without the applicant ever learning about it. Or, the unaccredited degree could come to light after being hired and the employee could be suspected of fraud and terminated.

 

I don't like "World U". Although they admit up front that their "degrees" are unaccredited, they're still heavily implying that they're at least worth the printer paper. I don't think they are.

Contrast this with OSSU: https://github.com/ossu/ They're very clear that you don't get a piece of paper. At all. Just knowledge. You're just getting the equivalency of what others will learn in the classroom. For a lot of people who want to get into CS/DS at the entry level, that's sufficient. It's great for people who don't need a(nother) degree but who want to get into a technical field.

"World U", on the other hand, feels like they're trying to deceive people.

 

Agreed - trying to deceive people. But not very successfully, according to this thread, anyway.
Had a look at OSSU - from initial impression - I like it. GitHub is certainly the right community for it.

 

Yes to all - and unlike World U. - no fake degree. Potential low-cost paths to a REAL one, as you point out. Strictly legit. Even though it's Microsoft-owned, I tend to trust GitHub. A lot of fine work done there. Let's KEEP the degree pathways legit -and avoid the outfits that aren't. How be we just keep exposing them for people who need to know?

 

I agree, but what is a university? I worked in 2002 at Jones International University, a RA accredited being run from one office space in CO. No research nor academic development other than a company looking to maximize profits.
This is a one man operation that makes you think, he is giving you a paper with big names based on cheap coursera courses so he is profiting from top names with no investment. Very smart move. As for legality of the degree, he is a smart man so he can just partner with Azteca, UCN or similar and grant propio degrees and make them legal.
The concept of the university nowadays is very lose, it is no longer a place with libraries, librarian, research facilities, etc but a legal paper granted from a computer server running from india with outsourced teaching to cheap places.
Everything starts with an idea, he is just testing the waters. If the model works, getting the legal degree is easy but a bit expensive. The propio thing opens the door to grant cheap degrees. I keep getting offers of ENEB and other schools selling degrees for $200, $140, etc.

Education models are changing. It is not very clear what a university is other than just a legal entity that complies with the law of the country where its registered. With technology, it is not so difficult to register a school in Spain and run it from Turkey and grant degrees in the US and the market them through groupon for $99.

The other issue is that the massive offering of online degrees from all over the world. As employers are not going to verify every single degree that comes from any place, they are putting more emphasis on skills and experience and less on the paper.

Government and university jobs need accredited degrees, I agree. However, do you really need an accredited degree for every job? Someone can just educate themselves through cheap course era courses and become an AI consultant and claim an MBA in AI. Is this unethical if the degree is not accredited?

 

I think so. People, on average, don't know much or anything about accreditation, degree recognition, etc. They assume the degree comes from a legitimate source.

An unaccredited school can be legitimate. But it isn't automatically so. In fact, it is not until it proves itself to be so. Back in the '70s and '80s, you could say that about a lot of unaccredited schools. Now, almost all of them have either gotten accreditation or have gone out of business. A tiny fraction remain, and not for long.

Frankly, there is no excuse for getting a degree from an unaccredited school, except for a few narrow niche ones.

 

But he doesn't. Probable reasons, as I see them:

(a) He'd have to pay money to the partners. He doesn't want that.
(b) "Legal" just does not interest him. If it did, he'd have set up in Panama or somewhere else where you can just buy a license and award "legal" degrees with no standing.

How does what he is doing make him "smart"? I just don't see anything "smart" in this. I think it's only "smart" to people who let BS baffle their brains. These are not simply unaccredited degrees - they are non-degrees. Degree-looking papers with no granting authority to back then up.

Again, БЛЯТЬ! (Cut and paste into Russian Google Translate if you don't know it.)

 

He is just testing the model. A website has little cost. The OP found it because he was looking for a cheap accredited degree. The key is that he uses well known universities in the diploma to make look legit.

If he gets enough sales, he can just open a religious exempt school in Florida and call them Ethereal MBAs or Metaphysical MBAs. I am sure if you have the volume Azteca, CLEA, UCN or alike would like to partner with you at no cost.

It is a new model that we have never seen before. A school that grants a degree based on courseera based education.

What is the cost of accrediting a DEAC school? I looked at the paper work and might be less than one million dollars to get yourself a DEAC accredited school.

I tried to see how much a university sells in Mexico and there were few universities for sale for about 100K with proper registration and accreditation. Think about it, with the cost of 10 PhDs from Azteca you can just get your own Mexican school and print as many propio PhDs as you want. Azteca found a loophole, propio degrees are recognized at some African places as long as the University is properly registered in Mexico with the minister of Education. So Azteca can just be offering one degree in Mexico but printing thousands of PhDs as long as the word propio is printed in the diploma.

California University Foreign Credential evaluation service is registered as a high school in California. The registration is probably few thousand dollars and with this they have the right to call themselves a school and grant honorary Foreign equivalence degrees. The government has tried to shut them down but technically they dont seem to be doing anything illegal. Many schools affiliate themselves with them because people are buying.

There was a point an unaccredited school in the UK or Ireland was printing degrees with a University of Liverpool stickers, it is a silly model but people were buying the degree just because the sticker.

We can laugh at these operations all we want but I am sure Azteca, CUFCE and alike are making little fortunes as they keep expanding with more operations overseas.

Like the OP, there are probably millions of people searching on the internet for cheap degrees with names from known schools to impress on a CV so the prospect market seems to be huge.

 

I think the exception can be religious degrees. I don't see why I should spend thousands of dollars so I can be a reverend or a pastor serving a corner church during the weekends as a volunteer. I believe some of those well known book writers in Metaphysics have unaccredited PhDs (Men are from Mars and Women from Venus author as an example).

https://www.u.arizona.edu/~wrightr/johns.html

 

Are these more of the places like DQ (or whatever it's called), or do they actually present degrees/diplomas from a single school instead of an amalgam of 5 schools?

Also...where do you find these places? I have found only a couple, mostly places that go through the 4-university-joint-issued DQ diplomas, but I'm sure there are more.

 

I think you probably know masstercursos https://www.masstercursos.com/. WES does not recognize them.

I am sure there are quite schools like this one. There are also many issuing Isabel degree as propio degrees but not as cheap as ENEB.

These degrees have no value in Canada, someone claimed a WES evaluation from a propio degree from ENEB but this might have been a fluke.

One possible use of these degrees is to evaluate them as credits and not degrees and get a BS from Excelsior or alike. ECE evaluates ECTS credits from accredited schools.