ARTS, Accreditors in General, and CHEA

Just to wade into these waters a bit...

There really is no reason for an institution not to be accredited today.

Do I judge harshly someone who attended an unaccredited school in California in the heyday of unaccredited schools? Nope. Especially pre-internet things like proximity mattered a lot. You wanted to go get an education and there was a place nearby where you could work on your degree part time? Many people did it. Accreditation was also nowhere near as widespread and state approval largely reigned supreme.

This was also an era where degrees were less common for certain professions, certificates or diplomas carried more weight and, most importantly, moving between states could completely upend your entire career because of a lack of interstate licensing reciprocity. Today, for a dentist to pick up and move from New York to Utah is not really a big deal. Fill out some forms and get a license. Decades ago that might involve a new residency (regardless of how long you had been in practice) or sometimes a license being denied for no reason other than that state not wanting out of staters coming in and taking business from locals.

There was this elderly woman my family knew in high school who used to take great pride in saying she had never left the city of Scranton her entire life. Two hours to Philadelphia or New York from that spot. She had been to neither. She hadn't even gone as far as Wilkes-Barre or Binghamton. Worlds used to be very small for a lot of people. It's not shocking that spending an entire life at a company wasn't uncommon when very few people left their county of residence for anything more than a weekend of camping or a school trip.

As our worlds grew the need for our education to grow with us also grew. We live at a time when an EMT or Paramedic from Florida can work seasonally in New York and Oregon without having to retake their certification because they have a national registry and broad acceptance across the states. Decades ago it was a patchwork of state compacts with wildly different academic standards. The world changed a lot. And our need for some sort of near universal standard has increased dramatically.

Accreditation is the standard. And we can wish it was the way it was before (with all of the negatives that came with it) but that doesn't change the fact that barring a massive legislative push at the federal level, accreditation is going to be the standard for the foreseeable future.

The bigger issue, IMHO, and the one that states CAN influence more directly, is trying to control degree inflation. In my academic lifetime Physician Assistant went from an Associates degree to a bachelors degree to a combined BS/MS and now there are doctoral offerings. Physical Therapy followed a similar path. Both law school and medical school were once possible, even into the early 2000s without an undergrad degree provided you met other academic prereqs.

Not every bit of, particularly career qualifying, education needs to result in an academic degree.

Accreditation for academic degrees is here to stay. The area for influence is what professional qualifications are earned for different professions at different levels. Even skilled trades are moving to at least associate level programs in many areas.

Accreditation isn't the issue. It solves quite a few problems. The issue is that higher education is gobbling up trade qualification but not producing the same outcomes as their purpose built predecessors.

 

Most of the explanations I've seen as to why schools aren't accredited are either outright lies, misrepresentations, and so on. Sometimes self-delusion and often simply for marketing purposes trying to explain away why they couldn't become accredited.

But those are sold to a not necessarily gullible public but people who are involved in the deception. They want some explanation to resolve cognitive dissonance over the lack of accreditation. I've also seen bizarre explanations from people about the nature of substandard degrees and how they are justified. This includes by people who claim to be Christian. And sometimes the explanations really are self-centered about them deserving a degree even if it doesn't meet anything close to an academic standard.

 

I'm not going to make defense of people who either actively deceive or simply fail to do even a baseline of due diligence on their own.

However, the intent for either camp is wildly different. It can be tricky figuring out whether someone was duped by marketing or was trying to deceive. And that trickiness is the reason why we as a society tend to steer clear of these things. If you walk into my office smelling of shit I don't know whether you came by it honestly and through doing something you absolutely should not have been doing. Intent goes a long way in a lot of areas. But in the end, you still smell like shit.

Most of these unaccredited religious schools would never warrant a mention from us if they just awarded non-academic credentials. If LBU offered diplomas and certificates they would probably never have been mentioned more than a casual "Oh hey, did anyone see this?" sort of post over the years.

 

John Bear wrote about this dilemma back in 2000 in University Business. He didn't have a locked-in solution to the dilemma.

If you plunk down your credit card to receive a diploma, transcript, and verification service, you're a villain. But what if you did some work to get your degree? What if you didn't understand what accreditation really was and were fooled by some claim of ersatz accreditation?

Long-time posters on this board will remember one of its members who wrote a book on a bird he'd been studying for a very long time. He then shopped that book to a diploma mill who sold him a doctorate on that basis. (There is strong reason to believe they would have sold a diploma to the bird as long as the credit card cleared.) Victim or Villain? Interesting dilemma. But it gets weirder. He then came on this board (and, I believe, its USENET predecessor before that), touting his "accomplishment." Of course, the knives came out and he was accused of being a Villain for buying a degree. But was he? Or was he just naive?

It might have stayed there, except for one thing: he did it again. He shopped the book to a second fake school, who issued him a PhD from the owner's basement. There was some effort related to this school's operations to resemble a university, but the bottom line was that it wasn't recognized as such by any legitimate authority. What our intrepid author got instead was an upgraded version of a fake doctorate from a fake school. He fought all comers for years regarding this, but he never really could defend it. Sadly, he was otherwise very accomplished, and had even received an award from his government on the level of an MBE from the UK. He was a real guy doing real work, but wanted to take a real shortcut to a fake doctorate. He went from possibly being a Victim to being a full-blown Villain (on this issue), when he should have been 100% good guy.

 

Cost is a common reason given for not pursuing accreditation, but then a college pays thousands of dollars to an unrecognized accreditor, and it's like...you could have spent that money on TRACS, DEAC, or ABHE accreditation.