A St. Regis Valupack: Buy in Bulk

Legitimate: if by that you mean are the operating legally the answer is yes, if by that do you mean it is a recognized and valued school the answer is no.

Also what are you looking for, if you want a fancy piece of paper to hang on your wall to cover a blemish there are better choices. If you are looking ofr an education whihc you can be proud of, and not have to worry about defending the rest of your career there are a lot better choices.

 

Len was the person who wrote: "On this, are we sure of our facts that SRU is a degree mill, or is it simply a matter of follow the leader (John) just because we feel good about it and just because that is John's view?"

I responded at length, and Len ignored my response.

I'm not sure what Len is looking for, but I doubt it's something I would want to help him with.

 

I believe "Len" is the Head of the MBA Program at SRU :

http://saintregis.edu.lr/faculty.htm

 

Hmm, could be. "Len" is certainly short for "Leonard". Len and Leonard are both in South Africa. Both are interested in MBA programs. And both are less negative on SRU than most of the rest of us.

How about it, Len? Are you Leonard van der Walt?

 

Leonard's dissertation is listed on the SRU dissertation page: THE LINK BETWEEN PRODUCTS EDUCATION & BRAND BUILDING IN THE MARKETING ENVIRONMENT.

It's interesting that all of his degrees -- BA (Com), BBA(Econ), MBA, and PhD -- are from Saint Regis University. (He also has a Certificate in Road Transport Management from Unisa and a certificate and diploma from MANCOSA.)

 

Yep, that's me! Got nothing to hide. And I am glad to see that at least my postings have been termed "less negative on SRU than most of the rest of us". I certainly have tried and will try and keep my postings non-aggressive. Why fight if one can reason calmly. Why fight at all....

Glad to be part of your forum.

Regards,

Len.

 

Len, welcome to the forum. Do you have any guess or opinion on why all those URL physical addresses that Mark posted all have the first few same numbers? Also, what about that talk about the snail mail address moving around for SRU?

 

In that case, I'm certain that you'll tell us all about the history & current status of http://www.distancedegree.edu.pk

That website is owned & controlled by Saint Regis University. It has been, shockingly, unavailable for the past 3 days.

Len...since you are employed by Saint Regis, perhaps you could shed some light on this. After all, your employer owns the website, right?

So...why has the discussion board been unavailable for the last few days?

 

Dennis: The American federal government should start an investigation right now - under anti-combines legislation. Someone is trying to corner the market on degree mills.


Roy: The federal authorities can't do much about enforcing anti-combines legislation if the proprietors of these degree mills are not located on U.S. soil. It's true that some of these schools claim that they have campuses in the U.S. So how difficult is it to open a mail box? Collect the tuition.....award the degrees....then shut it down and move on to a new location when the IRS and the FBI get involved. If someone is trying to corner the market on degree mills, they're doing a good job. Nearly all of these site look and smell like SRU.

 

Furthermore Len, you have offered up your MBA and PhD abstracts and dissertations for scrutiny.

Why don't you provide us with that information here?

 

NOthing sinister here, Bill. Product diversification is after all a major strategy in business today, and SRU has never claimed to be anything other than a private, for profit school (like hundreds of others in the USA and elsewhere). The issue here is one of marketing and the way in which a product (here, higher education) is delivered to a discerning public. The branch campuses were set up by NBOE, which owns but does not accredit SRU, in an attempt to diversify the course offerings, with the aim that some would focuson particular academic areas such as business, and that they would offer a greater degree of autonomy for some faculty who wanted to have a bigger part in proceedings. The NBOE is fully entitled by the Liberian MoE to set up and accredit branch campuses anywhere in the world. In some respects the project was over-ambitious, and within a short time NBOE re-thought the strategy, re-acquired those branch campuses that had been franchised out and brought the branch campuses back within the SRU fold. Now there are a couple of affiliated schools out there (Breyer State in Idaho and Al Qasim in Pakistan), but these are part of a more limited outreach in which SRU maintains its main identity.

As to why the numbers match, I've partially answered that already. Perhaps the best way to think of it is of NBOE as an umbrella entity with various branches and forms of marketing emanating from it. Sorry if you don't like the idea of higher education as a business in which for-profitplayers have a stake, or if you don't like the style of marketing (compare UoP, however, which goes as far if not further), but it is increasingly becoming a reality that private education providers, working hand in hand with business, are providing solutions that are proving popular with certain sections of the public whose needs they meet.

The physical address issue is explained by the following chronology:

1984: SRU is chartered as a small bricks and mortar non-degree awarding technical school in LIberia. One of its graduates at this period is the present Commissioner on Higher Education in Liberia, Dr Lawrence Bestman.

1990's: The bricks and mortar school operation becomes uneconomic and the school closes. It continues existence as a paper corporation.

1998: A consortium which is to become the NBOE, headed by Dr Richadr Hoyer acquires the corporation, together with Robertstown, which has a similar history, and begins application for Liberian accreditation (to award degrees) and preparation for a switch to a totally online operation.

Late 2001: The online operation is trialled with a temporary license from Dominica to award degrees. At this stage, there is no certainty that Liberian accreditation will be granted. Accreditation is also obtained as a branch campus of IUFS, Russia in 2002.

August 2002: Liberian accreditation is granted. SRU ceases operations in Dominica and abandons IUFS link. It re-establishes an office and personnel in Liberia, whilst continuing to base some operations elsewhere, notably in the US and Pakistan.

Late 2002: Dr Hoyer resigns from SRU to pursue other interests. SRU management restructures and abandons many of the links forged in the Hoyer era, including associations with dubious *accrediting agencies*.


You'll be asking what is done from the US, and what from Liberia. I expect some more questions on this, but the simple answer to the numbers question firstly is that there is no reliable webserver in West Africa that can provide an always-on service, so SRU has always used webservers based in the US and staff there to maintain them. All archives and documentation are stored in Monrovia.

General administration is undertaken in Liberia in peacetime, although at present little can be achieved in Monrovia because of the war. Jallah Faciann is SRU's Director in Monrovia; he's a Liberian and lives there permanently, and has remained there throughout the conflict. Other SRU staff divide their time between the US, Liberia and other countries. Some are based in the US, such as Blake Carlson, but spend much of their time in Liberia. Richard Novak acts as a roving ambassador for SRU and is currently at the peace talks in Ghana until the 30th.

Hope this is helpful.

Regards,

Len.

 

Checked their website just to make sure they hadn't adopted Harvard's curriculum as Len seems to intimate.

I can still buy my honourary doctorate for $1,000 and be assessed for a doctorate for $1,500.

Any discussion involving the name St. Regis and the word education is so much horse crap. Case closed.

 

Glad to help. Yes, it's owned by SRU (actually, contrary to what some have been saying, an answer to that effect was posted on the board by Dr Seyed before the board went down). Frankly, we weren't anticipating that we'd be facing so much questioning on the operation of SRU there; Dr Dovelos made his invitation to you *off his own bat* as it were, and I must say it caught us slightly on the hop.

There are two main reasons why it's down. Reason one is technical; the webservers we were using have become unreliable and we need to look at the reasons behind that so as to provide a reliable service. Many people were telling us they couldn't get onto the board or couldn't post, so we decided to take a serious look at that. BY the way, Dr Seyed, who administers the board, is a Pakistani, hence the edu.pk address. We could easily have got a US address, but the .pk was the first availalble one we liked. Did you know SRU now has an alumni office in India, serving India and Pakistan?

Reason two is that it seemed to us that if we gave full answers to everything that was asked about SRU, firstly we'd be there all day, and secondly, the board would simply become *about SRU* to the exclusion of all else. That was not our intention; if you'd looked, you would have found plenty about other DL programs there, discussions on accreditation, the CA-approved schools, Almeda/Concordia, etc.

There is a limit to what can be achieved here. I think one of the things that concerns me is that many people here come at SRU from a standpoint of reading a lot of the negative publicity that's out there which, when true (which isn't often) reflects SRU as it was in the past rather than as it is now. I think the comparison is stretching it a bit, but the change that happened post-Hoyer is perhaps not unlike LaSalle/Orion. The management are committed to trying to get things right and get SRU into a position where it can compete with the best in the market. We're on that path, but remember that we're only a year into that process since gaining accreditation. We won't get there straight away.

The forum will be coming back, probably in a few week's time.

If you have an open mind, keep watching SRU. We're dynamic, forward-looking and pioneering a new approach to DL that has attracted a large number of supporters. Of course, SRU isn't ever going to be a solution for everyone. But on the basis of the informal research we've done, SRU degrees have a higher rate of acceptance at RA school *sight unseen* than CA and WY schools put together. And no, they don't confuse us with Regis University. *St Regis University, LIBERIA* was very clearly put to the people concerned.

Oh yes - and whilst AACRAO *itself* won't evaluate SRU as RA equivalent, AACRAO members have done and continue to do so. Don't ask for their names, we don't have a policy of exposing them to harassment calls and threats to report them to the authorities; nor with the many RA schools that have accepted SRU grads for further study.

The bottom line is that, however much you or anyone else may not like it, SRU is legitimately accredited by the Liberian MoE (following a four year process which is EXACTLY the same as that gone through by all Liberian schools, including U of Liberia and Cuttington) and that accreditation gives its degrees utility in many situations. That's why it remains a viable option among DL institutions. We don't have the degreeinfo seal of approval yet, but we're working on it, and if your mind isn't closed to accepting that a school can change for the better, you might find us of interest.

Kind regards,

Len.

 

But nothings changed - you can still buy a friggin degree today.

 

edu.pk extension

[On another thread] some people have commented that the edu.pk extension is also used by Concordia. Concordia is NBOE accredited, but has no other link with SRU. It's run by Kristiaan DeLey (www.deley.be) in tandem with Capitol University.

A little bird tells me that the certificate on the Concordia site from the Liberian NCHE might not be genuine......I'll say no more, though. I'm sure Dr DeLey will be happy to answer any questions you have on Concordia and confirm he has no connection with SRU beyond that through the NBOE.

As for SRU and Robertstown, they share an office building in Monrovia and SRU staff have been strongly involved in helping get Robertstown off the ground. Robertstown, however, is not at present owned by the NBOE (like SRU), although it does have NBOE accreditation. Like SRU, it also has full Liberian MoE accreditation and approval(in its case, gained in 2003 after the standard four-year process). SRU and Robertstown are separate corporations and as time goes on, Robertstown will functionfully independently from SRU> For now, though, you can expect close collaboration between the two during Robertstown's start-up period; sharing facilities, the admin staff and faculty helping out, etc etc. Again, RU is transferring from a former bricks and mortar operation to being a fully online school.

Regards,

Len.

 

I find it interesting that when John (the chairman of SRU's psychology department?) dissappears, Len (the chairman of their MBA program?) immediately takes his place.

I opened this thread by drawing attention to seven phony internet "universities", each of which claimed Liberian accreditation, each of which purported to offer doctoral degrees and each of which had appeared virtually overnight.

Everyone knows the tremendous labor that goes into creating a new university. The process takes years. They know the kind of resources that go into offering credible doctoral programs. Yet here we had the sudden appearance of at least seven of them, out of nowhere.

These instant universities affected American addresses in the Washington DC area. Yet depite Len's claim that the NBOE is somehow authorized to set up branch campuses anywhere in the world, it seems that degree granting post-secondary institutions in the United States must be licensed/approved by their jurisdiction before they can legally operate.

Were any of these SRU marketing fronts licensed to operate as universities in Virginia, DC or Maryland? I'd be very surprised if any of them were. (I'd guess that's why they semi-dissappeared as fast as they had appeared.)

Yet depite their sudden appearance out of nowhere and the strong possibility that they were operating illegally, they already possessed Liberian accreditation!. How was that miracle possible?

In my opinion, this little episode is strong evidence both of what SRU/NBOE really is, and of the academic credibility of Liberian "accreditation" in general.

 

It would be interesting to see a photo of the S & G Building at 73 Carey St., Monrovia. There is a law office, Kemp & Assoc., there so it can't be too shabby. Some "Caribbean" universities coincidentally share the same address as a law office.

Does the building have wings housing the different universities, as stated on the websites?

 

Re: edu.pk extension

Yet more evidence of the worthlessness of Liberian accreditation. DeLey's two mills, along with his own bogus accrediting agency, DGAA, are well known to many here.

DeLey's "credentials" were, by his own admission, given to him by the U.K. version of Trinity C&U in exchange for translating their web site into Dutch and placing it on a free web-hosting service. Sometime later those "degrees" transmogrified into U.S. Trinity C&U diplomas despite both non-schools' repeated insistence that they are/were unrelated.

DeLey must have found the Trinity experience profitable, as he later created Capitol on the same free sites. One of the earliest versions, pre-Zyweb, offered back-dated diplomas.

 

But they only have one common phone line and a common fax line:

Robertstown University Monrovia
University Services
73 Carey Street
S&G Building East Wing
1000 Monrovia 10, Liberia
West Africa
Phone: +377 47 528-637
Fax/Voicemail: 309 412 1966


St. Regis University
Dr. Jallah Faciann, Director
73 Carey Street
S&G Building West Wing
1000 Monrovia 10, Liberia
West Africa
Phone: 377 47 528-637
Fax/Voicemail: 309 412 1966

So I guess sharing facilities is true.

 

Len, thanks for the explanations.

Would you care to comment on what the ODA says?

http://www.osac.state.or.us/oda/unaccredited.html