ASIC and Foreign Credential Evaluators?

Does anyone know how a Foreign Credential Evaluator assesses a credential from an ASIC accredited institution.

I imagine the credential would have to come from a UK based institution as I assume a Foreign Credential Evaluator wouldn't evaluate a US based credential even though it was accredited by a foreign entity because the US based institution isn't foreign (and would have some kind of authority/exemption from a US State).

 

A NACES member evaluation service might not evaluate it but there are others that might like Validential or alike. If your intention is to use it for employment purposes, NAFSA members can work but if your intention is to use the evaluation for University employment, government jobs or immigration a NACES member evaluation would be the best but most likely will not evaluate ASIC accredited schools as US regional accredited. The main criteria is that the school is recognized by the minister of education of the local country where the school resides.

 

@Garp I just took a look at ASIC's accreditation standards and applications for international institutions. If you have a few moments, please take a look at this material and provide your evaluation.

 

And the religious world can be one of those where it really is a case of will it meet your current and future needs. If you were looking for a job in an independent fundamentalist Baptist Church having a graduate degree from Yale Divinity School may not open doors whereas a degree from Louisiana Baptist University or Andersonville Theological Seminary may open doors.

And among some denominations there are issues such as a liberal United Methodist conference is not going to be thrilled with a Gordon Conwell degree (even though Gordon Conwell is academically top quality because it leans Reformed). And due to lack of accreditation neither Louisiana Baptist University or Andersonville Theological Seminary will work for the United Methodist Church as a qualifying credential or many others denominations.

Lutherans are similarly picky about what Synod the Theological Seminary is attached to.

 

Although, Steve Levicoff described a phenomenon where a theologically mature and confident conservative Christian would sometimes choose a prestigious liberal institution for their higher degree, with the idea their witness would be tested and come out stronger. (It would probably have to be a liberal institution even their fellow conservatives would concede was academically solid, which would surely exclude some liberal/mainline seminaries. I don’t know about Yale, but the broader prestige of Yale would help. It could be a public university in a social science or humanities field. A conservative Christian with a less well developed theology would be cautioned against this approach.)

 

@mbwa shenzi would you mind filling us in on ASIC?

 

I guess another way to look at the whole thing is that ASIC is a private accreditor in the UK (accreditors in the US are private) that has government recognition (Home Secretary) to do a form of quality assurance on educational institutions where visas may be granted and to ensure that the institutions are actually providing education.

To what depth they do what they do I don't know. Whether for instance they evaluate a doctoral program as providing doctoral level education. Perhaps they do and that is part of ensuring it is not a bogus institution.

A poor man's (educational institution's) form of accreditation recognized by the government?

 

@Michael Burgos

Not at all!

A bit of background first. Although I graduated with a PhD from one the oldest universities in my country, I left the academic side of things to work in credential evaluation. Also, I’ve been researching degree mills for almost 20 years now (I came across my first Axact entity, Bonneville University, in 2005) and provide background material to the New York Times articles about Axact. I still work closely with Allen Ezell on Axact.

Now, some of you already know this of course, but for those of you who don’t:

UK higher education institutions come in two categories, the degree-awarding ones, and the non-degree awarding ones. Members of the first category are also known as ‘recognised bodies’:These are the universities and university-level colleges. The second category, known as ‘listed bodies’ provide for example bridging courses for entry into programs at recognised bodies, programs that lead to the award of a degree but also various vocational qualifications. You’ll find them all, including those that are no longer registered, here The OfS Register - Office for Students

You can compare the content of that list with what’s in ASIC’s UK directory. ASIC - ASIC As you will see, there is not much overlap. The agency responsible for quality assurance of tertiary education in the UK is not ASIC but the QAA, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. That has never been ASIC’s role in the higher education landscape of the UK.

On a free market, there may also be all sorts of providers of education that refer to themselves as colleges, although these are neither recognised nor listed bodies. In the UK, at the time ASIC was founded, these schools were allowed to admit foreign students under the so-called Tier IV Visa System.

ASIC was appointed by the then UK Border Agency (now UK Visas and Immigration) to accredited UK-based schools for the purpose of study visas under the Tier IV system.

ASIC accreditation of various so-called (postgraduate) colleges in the UK back then consisted of checking whether there was a school, if there were any students and if some sort of tuition actually took place. Fairly basic. It was understood that ASIC would be able to distinguish between genuine and bogus colleges but there were those who questioned ASIC’s ability to make that distinction. In fact, there were concerns about ASIC’s ability to successfully perform its duties as a government watchdog in this respect almost from the beginning, and complaints that the Home Office received and ignored warnings from, among others, Universities UK.

Already from the outset, ASIC’s member list included schools of rather questionable academic standing. There was for example Marcel Ezenwoye Okechukwu’s Concepts College, Nasser Heydarian’s Trans-Atlantic College and Cromwell College of IT and Management, a school linked to a degree mill called Barbican University, accredited by Maxine Asher’s World Association of Universities and Colleges. If memory serves me right, another Barbican affiliate, Essex College in London, was also ASIC accredited for a while. I have posted elsewhere on this forum about both Marcel Eze and Nasser Heydarian so suffice it to say that former is a graduate of a shade Russian school active in the early years of this millennium. So is the latter but in addition to this, he was a member of the government of the virtual micro-nation Dominion of Melchizedek. There was even a University of Melchizedek for a while, with Sheila Danzig as Vice-Chancellor, I believe.

In or around 2011, ASIC went international. ASIC of course has no remit outside the UK, but as I have mentioned before, there is nothing in UK legislation that prevents ASIC from accrediting whatever ASIC wants. ASIC’s competitor BAC, the British Accreditation Council does the same but BAC is a full member of ENQA, the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education and in the EQAR register, the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education. EQAR is the official register of quality assurance agencies the European Higher Education Area that follow the ESG, European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance. ASIC doesn’t, and never did.

ASIC was never a full member of ENQA. It was, for some years, an ENQA affiliate member but was dismissed as an affiliate on 18 June 2020. The formal basis for dismissal is given in A02-Draft-minutes-GA-290420.pdf (enqa.eu). There were, however, concern among ENQA members ASIC’s accreditation procedures, A04-Dismissal-of-ASIC-as-ENQA-affiliate.pdf. ASIC never sent any representatives to ENQA events but made frequent reference to its status as an ENQA affiliate in the marketing of its services. The same applies to ASIC’s membership with CHEA’s International Quality Group. My understanding, but please feel free to correct me, is that membership with that group is open to everyone.

Continued below.

 

One of the issues was that of independent accreditation. ASIC at the time had and may still have an advisory board of academic consultants. One of the consultants was Fred DiUlus, who was on the Board of Trustees of US school called Hasaca National University, later Trans-Pacific University. In 2016, Hasaca National University was ASIC accredited see Hasaca National University | ASIC (bsne.ch)It’s still in the BPPE list of denied schools, see Denied Schools - Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education So is, by the way, Ubiquity University. This school secured ASIC accreditation within a month from being denied approval to operate a non-accredited institution by the BPPE in California. Another school, which I will not name, opted for BAC accreditation after being ASIC accredited for a while. After a year or so, BAC revoked the accreditation on the grounds that the university "failed to meet even minimum requirements".

Another of the academic advisors was Prof Dr Gerhard Berchtold, who, while both schools were accredited by ASIC, was dean of the European programs of both Universidad Central de Nicaragua and Universidad Azteca. Oh, yes, the founder/president of Limkokwing University of Creative Technology in Malaysia too was on ASIC’s academic advisory board. The university was accredited by ASIC of course.

Another issue was ASIC’s ability to tell a penguin from a cello, to quote Pete Doherty. The number of, well, controversial schools ASIC has accredited is impressive. The list includes Akamai University; American Liberty University; Atlantic International University; The University of America, aka Salt Lake Bible College; The University of Atlanta; Saint Monica University; Poma International Business University; Delta International University of New Orleans; Warnborough College. To name but a few.

As far as US schools accredited by ASIC are concerned, most of them are of course at considerable distance from either regional or national accreditation. In at least one case, ASIC has accredited a US school accredited by three accreditation mills, including the American Association for Higher Education and Accreditation. More about that below, but first, I think I need to point out that ASIC also accredited Axact entities, for example Orlando University, or schools run by individuals with links to Axact. For a while, ASIC accredited Global Vision University, see Global Vision University | DegreeInfo

In 2015, Umair Hamid, a senior employee of Axact travelled to the US to complete the purchase of Almeda (College and) University and Pass Christian University from the owner, who ran (if you’re not familiar with it) what was then one largest degree operation in the US. I’m not sure whether it was the former or the new owner that changed the name Pass Christian University to Paramount California University (Axact later changed it to Pacific Cambria University) but it was in ASIC’s directory of international schools from 11 Februari to 8 March 2015, if memory serves me right, that is, shortly before Declan Walsh published his articles about Axact in the New York Times.

But before PCU disappeared from ASIC’s directory, its ASIC accreditation was celebrated by a bloke who was a director of the American Association for Higher Education and Accreditation, AAHEA. This is an accreditation mill and if you’re interested, here’s some info Inquiry Into Higher-Education Group Reveals Odd Connections (chronicle.com).

Which brings me back to Fred DiUlus. Dr DiUlus, academic advisor of ASIC, was one of AAHEA’s directors, many of whom are seasoned veterans in the field of let’s say universities and colleges with alternative recognition. Many of them also hold either positions at or degrees from ASIC accredited schools and some were actively involved with St Regis University. I could of course go into quite lengthy details about AAHEA, but I’ll stop here. I’ve posted information about AAHEA to various threads on this forum before. Suffice it to say that to many of us in the evaluation business, it’s quite likely that ASIC is not entirely independent of AAHEA.

So the answer to Garp’s question, if we limit this to the ENIC-NARIC offices of Western Europe, is that since ASIC is not an assigned quality assurance body for higher education in the UK, but a provider of services for UK Visas and Immigration, we consider ASIC accreditation irrelevant for our purposes. A degree from US school with ASIC accreditation but no accreditation from a CHEA and/or USDE recognized agency will not be evaluated by us. We are also of the opinion that ASIC has no remit outside the UK and since ASIC does not follow European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, it’s not an agency we consider meaningful for our work. It is useful though in the sense that it usually makes us take a closer look at a school claiming ASIC accreditation.

 

@mbwa shenzi

Outstanding!! Thank you so much for weighing in.

 

ASIC has two directories; UK Directory and International Directory. I think it's fair to point out that almost all the potentially controversial ASIC schools are in the International Directory as opposed to the UK Directory. The only possible exception that I could find (and I went through the entries one-by-one) was Logos College (UK), which provides ASIC-accredited programs that you can then use to get degrees through the unaccredited Logos University in Florida. They specifically say: "Our Degrees are awarded by Logos University, Jacksonville, Florida, USA." Even in that case, UK's ASIC-accredited Logos College does not grant the final degree. At this point in time, I don't have any problems with the UK colleges that they have approved. Many of them offer regulated UK qualifications, which you can then top-up through major UK universities. Legit stuff.

 

Of late this forum has become less of an educational forum than Political/Off Topic forum (which most new posts seem to consist of). Which is fine if that's where people want it (discussing Trump is a national obsession).

BUT this form is at its finest when posts like mbwa shenzi's appear that are informative and unravel issues in education.

What he discussed I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. It was enlightening to say the least.

 

Except for the very few stray posts like the last few (including this one) the political oriented posts are in the Political Discussion Forum. During the Presidential election cycles the number of political posts definitely increases significantly.

 

ASIC claims in its latest newsletter that:

ASIC physically inspects all institutions with a physical teaching presence and conducts remote inspections where provision is based online, benchmarking institutions against our Standards of Accreditation and issuing comprehensive reports, with the final decision made independently by the ASIC Accreditation Committee.

 

In my view, there are two primary questions: First, is ASIC something tantamount to a recognized accreditor akin to one of the nationals in the US? I've concluded, given Mbwa Shenzi's helpful insight, that it is not. Second, does ASIC provide a legitimate means of quality assurance in its international accreditation process? I spent a half hour one afternoon and carefully read through the handbook and standards and if what it says is accurate, I have no reason to doubt it certainly does. Actually, I was impressed by the amount of evidence required and the depth of evaluation. The scope seems on par with the standards and approach of, say, ABHE. While I think some of ASIC's past behavior is troubling, it seems like a reasonable alternative for quality assurance for those institutions where conventional accreditation is out of reach or undesired. While I question some of its member schools, there are those that I know to be legitimate. Moreover, there is a pretty fair record of institutions moving from ASIC to a USDE-recognized accreditor.

 

There's also Warnborough College. Degrees awarded by Warnborough College Ireland, a school that according to John Bear in Bears' Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning (pp 237), "grant degrees, it would seem, because of the authority they have given themselves."

 

Quite a few of them, such as for example Limkokwing University of Creative Technology, Malaysia.