Are there any non-mill unaccredited schools left?

Discussion in 'Accreditation Discussions (RA, DETC, state approva' started by Bruce, Feb 2, 2019.

Loading...
  1. Bruce

    Bruce Moderator

    I was thinking that the world of DL was more interesting when there were legitimate unaccredited schools in the mix. The old Columbia Pacific, the old California Coast, the first incarnation of Greenwich, and even the early versions of Kennedy-Western.

    No one was ever going to mistake those schools for Harvard & Yale, but they weren’t outright mills, and it seems that they did serve a niche market.

    Are there any legitimate unaccredited schools still around?
     
  2. sanantone

    sanantone Well-Known Member

  3. eriehiker

    eriehiker Active Member

  4. eriehiker

    eriehiker Active Member

  5. eriehiker

    eriehiker Active Member

  6. eriehiker

    eriehiker Active Member

  7. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    My favorite (I've posted about it before) is the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. This one has exceedingly strong academics, is an affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union and awards one of its three masters programs jointly with the GTU. What's more, all of the specialist faculty for the GTU's Buddhist Studies PhD program are drawn from the IBS. It's currently a WASC candidate.

    I was going to say the California Jazz Conservatory which offers a bachelor of music degree in Berkeley, but it's gotten itself accredited by NASM (National Association of Schools of music, a DofEd recognized specialized accreditor).

    Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages in Berkeley doesn't offer degrees but it does offer a post-baccalaureate program of classes in classical Sanskrit and classical Tibetan along with some other stuff. Luis Gomez (a big name, emeritus from the U. of Michigan) was the founding academic director of this one, before his death in 2017. More here.
     
    Last edited: Feb 2, 2019
  8. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    One thing that we are seeing is independent scientific research organizations clustering around prominent universities and essentially functioning as if their facilities and research staff were additional university. Their laboratories welcome the university's research students, their researchers hold appointments as adjunct faculty at the university, advising and mentoring doctoral students. But the degrees are ultimately awarded by the university.

    MIT has a whole collection of them I believe. There are many of them clustered around Cambridge University in England.

    Out here, the University of California at San Diego (which is huge in the biological sciences) seems to offer most of its doctoral programs in that subject jointly with off-campus research organizations. They say that "The UC San Diego Biological Sciences program is a partnership between the Division of Biological Sciences and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies." The very high profile Salk Institute is adjacent to UCSD. It's up to its eyeballs in graduate level education, but it has no academic accreditation.

    UCSF has a similar arrangement with the Gladstone Institute, adjacent to the new UCSF Mission Bay campus. When a Gladstone researcher recently won a Nobel prize, UCSF lost no time in boasting about it as if he was one of theirs.

    The Buck Institute has a joint PhD program in the biology of aging with the University of Southern California, as well as a couple of joint masters programs with Dominican University and with Touro University's California osteopathic branch. In each case, the accredited university actually awards the degree.
     
    Last edited: Feb 2, 2019
  9. Bill Huffman

    Bill Huffman Well-Known Member

    Looks like we can conclude that the short answer is pretty much a no? Less interesting true but made up for that by being simple. :)
     
  10. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    Another one that I think is both interesting and credible is Maitripa College in Portland OR, approved by the Oregon ODA (!) but not otherwise accredited. It offers an MA, an MDiv I believe, and continuing education classes. In the past it was offering some DL, but I doen't believe that it currently does.

    https://maitripa.org/

    https://maitripa.org/maitripa_catalog/

    https://maitripa.org/faculty/

    While not formally accredited, it's associated with the FPMT (Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Tradition) a prominent Gelug organization, and is reasonably well known in its relevant community.
     
  11. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    I return to the original post because that’s where I think the problem is. While I agree with Bruce in most areas, I submit that the schools he named – all of them – were, in fact, degree mills.

    Having said that, keep in mind that I am the only author from those days that differentiated between the term degree mill and diploma mill. The latter would be one that you pay your money, you get your paper, or the requirements were so absurd (say, a 10-page doctoral dissertation) that the school was obviously a scam. A degree mill would require more work than a diploma mill, but still an insufficient amount when compared to its accredited counterparts.

    Columbia Pacific, the old California Coast (then known as California Western), Greenwich, and Kennedy-Western may not have been diploma mills, but they were always degree mills.

    The only difference between them and their modern counterparts is that there were less of them back then, since you couldn’t invent an immediate so-called university on the Internet in less than an hour, as you can do today. Today, they would have much more competition that is able to craft a cyber-image that makes it look as sophisticated as any accredited school.

    As for legitimate unaccredited programs, I went back in time and looked at the chapter on legit unaccredited schools in Name It & Frame It. Several of them no longer exist, several went on to become accredited by TRACS, and one or two even achieved regional accreditation. And no, I will not name any of them.

    One of the reasons I stopped revising NIFI (the last edition came out 24 years ago) was that I saw a day of information overload coming about – both because of the ability to start a mill on the internet, and because traditional schools were expanding into online studies. Today, everybody and their in-laws are in the online market, which is more than saturated, and, IMO, much of higher education has gone down the tubes. Other than hanging out here for the sake of entertainment and sharing my wisdom on rare occasion, I figure that I already paid my dues in this field can can’t otherwise be bothered.
     
  12. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    There are a couple of questions combined there. Must the school offer distance learning? Must it award degrees?

    My impression is that academically credible non-accredited distance learning schools that award degrees are indeed disappearing. It's hard for me to think of any off the top of my head.

    Academically credible non-accredited B&M programs might be disappearing, but they still do exist in small numbers. My IBS and Maitripa examples are two of them, drawn from a very small niche area of study. I expect that there are more examples in other areas.

    Where non-accredited educational institutions continue to flourish is as non-degree-granters. There are countless educational things out there, ranging from prestigious scientific research bodies that produce Nobel prizes, to on-the-job training programs, to specialized institutions like Mangalam above, to endless DL classes offered in no end of subjects. There are continuing education classes (often free), academic libraries, online journals, dissertation archives, even just about the entire catalogs of many academic publishers available as pirate downloads. These serve to teach you the material, and in some cases they will introduce you to names in your field that can write you recommendation letters. (Two of the most important functions of universities.)

    The way that I kind of anticipate things evolving is that more and more life-long learning will take this no-degree, no-credit form. And we will see more and more things like the "big three", Western Governors University and French "VAE" (which isn't a scam when its done right), kind of pulling it together into a coherent program and awarding accredited degrees for it. That's the wave of the future, in my opinion. The biggest force militating against it right now are the university professors, their unions, and their supporters in the halls of government, who fear that it might threaten the professors' livelihoods and perks.

    California used to be a hotbed of alternative education. But a while back they changed their law to require that all degree-granting schools have Dept of Education recognized accreditation. That's effectively outlawed all the old-style California-approved degree granters. I believe that a religious exemption still exists, so that IBS will probably survive even if it fails in its attempt to become accredited by WASC. (Its biggest hurdle isn't its impeccable academics, but rather its small size.)

    But even though unaccredited degree-granters are now more or less illegal in California, they still exist in some of the other states, in the Swiss cantons and places like that.
     
    Last edited: Feb 7, 2019
  13. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    Kizmet reminded me of this one: Signum University

    They are very focused on their niche, which is imaginative and especially medieval and medieval-inspired literature (mostly in English, especially JRR Tolkien). They offer an MA in Language and Literature which is New Hampshire approved but otherwise unaccredited.

    https://signumuniversity.org

    Signum's relatively new, an outgrowth of the Mythgard Institute which has been around for a while. We even have at least one old thread on it.

    https://mythgard.org/

    The Signum program seems credible:

    https://signumuniversity.org/departments/language-literature/ma-program/

    Their courses are absolutely great:

    https://signumuniversity.org/catalog/

    The faculty list includes some interesting people:

    https://signumuniversity.org/directory/

    Corey Olsen, Signum's founder, is reasonably well known in the world of 'Tolkien studies', has written books on the subject and hosts a popular (in its niche) 'podcast'.

    A web search shows it being mentioned by academics on .edu websites and a number of people say they are presenting papers at Signum's conferences (in medieval style they call them "moots").

    All in all, I think that this thing looks more interesting than any number of RA literature masters degree offerings, both because of its focus and not least because it's so evidently a labor of love by those who are doing it.

    An intersection between medieval and imaginative literature is kind of obvious to me, especially after I read Gawain and the Green Knight, which struck me as something akin to medieval science fiction. (Except that it has nothing to do with science.) It's more about imagining that one lives in a world in which a transcendent dimension is real and in some sense omni-present. That's a role that science plays today (or did until recently, the decline of science fiction over the last 20 years and the resurgence of fantasy suggests that's changing). I'm interested in religious studies as well, and the relevance is obvious.
     
  14. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    I was just looking at the list of Arizona-approved postsecondary schools.

    https://ppse.az.gov/

    Arizona's a peculiar place, since it only has three state universities and I was aware of only a few private ones. Meanwhile the state's population has been exploding. Well, it turns out that many colleges and universities from out of state operate branch campuses there (they never show up in the US News listings or other college listings). Creighton University, AT Still and the Mayo Clinic all run Arizona medical schools for example. (Who knew??) But they all share in the accreditation of their home campuses.

    I was curious about the School of Architecture at Taliesin, originally associated with Frank Lloyd Wright. Turns out that it's both RA and accredited by NAAB (National Architecture Accreditation Board). Damn. (Good for them, but I was looking for unaccredited ones.)

    I did find an interesting thing. The Unmanned Vehicle University in Scottsdale. I can't comment on how credible it is, but it's certainly interesting.

    https://www.uxvuniversity.com/

    They start at one end with FAA-approved training courses for drone pilots. At the other end, they offer a masters degree and a doctorate in UAV engineering. I couldn't find any accreditation.

    https://www.uxvuniversity.com/doctorate-degree/

    It certainly seems to work for some people. A Colorado congressman's newsletter says that his office sponsored an unemployed veteran who wanted to take done-pilot training at this thing, and even before the student finished that course he'd been hired by something called Navmar Applied Sciences which, among other things, turns out to be a defense contractor supplying drone services in Afghanistan. (Draw down the uniformed military and send in the contractors.) Our student was offered a year long tour in Afghanistan where he would be paid $500/day, seven days a week, for flying drones. That's approaching $200K/yr. (And there's not much to spend money on in Afghanistan.) I wonder how much his being a veteran who might conceivably have had in-country experience went into that hiring.

    The Unmanned Vehicle U. faculty list is impressive, although most of these people have jobs teaching at other universities or running their own companies and are listed as adjuncts here, so I wonder how much time they actually devote to this.

    My initial impression is that this might be a great way to get drone pilot training, training as a mechanic, and classes in things like drone laws and regulations. But when it comes to masters and doctoral degrees in engineering, I'm a bit more skeptical. But here it is.

    It certainly seems to be a sincere effort that's trying to exploit a new niche.
     
  15. cookderosa

    cookderosa Resident Chef

    gosh, there are about a zillion unaccredited cooking schools - not degree granting, but schools just the same.
     
  16. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Since this came up in another thread, I thought I would just mention it here.

    There are a handful of NYS registered (state authorized) programs that award degrees, have no USDOE recognized accreditation and, in some cases, are licensure qualifying. The notable example I found was programs for funeral services. They award an AOS in Mortuary Science or similar, qualify you for a NYS Funeral Directors license, are state approved but are still unaccredited.

    I wouldn't be surprised if we found similar examples in other states. I think the issue is that they are simply more niche than the way California was.
     

Share This Page