BEST UNACCREDITED PhD PROGRAM

WASC Accreditation
WASC Accreditation.
No. Is this misleading? .... Large bold fonts Wasc accreditation. Small fonts only candidacy.

 

Take another look. True, the program in question is still unaccredited ... but the point is that it's not a PhD program any more.
It's been switched to an EdD program.

Therefore, it is no longer an "unaccredited PhD program", as specified in the quoted post (post #35 above).
It has become an "unaccredited EdD program" instead.

 

No. The regional accreditors don't grant "Candidate" status unless they are confident that the school will be granted full accreditation at the end of the candidacy period. And in the meantime, the candidate school gets essentially the recognition as a fully accredited school. For example, they are already listed in the USDoE database of accredited programs.

So for all practical purposes, Sanford-Burnham is already WASC accredited. Technically, they need to include a legal disclaimer, but they've done that:

In reality, no one doubts that Sanford-Burnham will in fact get full accreditation at the end of the candidacy period. No harm, no foul.

 

I have accepted your answer. Then why even have a status of candidacy if all the fulfillment of accreditation have been met? I think with DETC candidacy is just that, no certainty of accreditation.

 

The regional agencies have a traditional policy: after a school achieves "Candidacy" status (which is difficult), the agencies watch an entire class enter, move through, and graduate from the institution. They withhold full accreditation until that class graduates.

But obviously this takes several years. A typical B&M school with a large operating budget would find it difficult to survive for several years without accreditation (for example, professors might not qualify for research grants, students would not qualify for financial aid, etc). So the school gets "pre-accreditation" at Candidacy, and "full accreditation" several years later.

DETC doesn't have "Candidacy". There are "Applicants" (which are not "pre-accredited"), and if they are accepted, they go straight to "Full Accreditation". The DETC accreditation process is much faster.

 

I believe this is generally true, but not always. Trinity College of the Bible and Eugene Bible College (now New Hope Christian College) both achieved candidacy status with their regional accreditation agencies. Neither made it through. As an aside, I am hesitant to even list these two schools in the same sentence together. New Hope is a very good school and has been accredited by the ABHE for decades. Trinity on the other hand, well....

 

The vast majority of regional accreditation "Candidates" make it all the way to "Full Accreditation". I don't know what the exact percentage is. But it's true that the number is less than 100%. .

Trinity is admittedly an unusual case. When Trinity became an RA candidate, it was kind of a shocking development. For example, look at this old degreeinfo post from 2005 (it's post #8 in this old thread):

We now know that Trinity did not, in fact, make it all the way to full accreditation. But Sanford-Burnham is different -- nobody was stunned or surprised in the slightest when Sanford-Burnham became an RA candidate, and everyone expects them to achieve full accreditation at the end of the candidacy period.

 

There may be a conflict in what you are writing. You did convinced many of us RA candidacy is certain accreditation. You now just admitted to a more knowledgeable person there is no certainty of accreditation.
Given this new information, is it unethical for an institution to prominently claim WASC ACCREDITATION but buried candidacy in the fine print? No one reads the fine print.

 

How can you say "no one reads the fine print" -- when you obviously read the fine print yourself ? It's not that difficult, given that the "fine print" in question is only four sentences long (for comparison, your post was five sentences long).

Sanford-Burnham is a very small and specialized research institution. It currently enrolls a grand total of 28 students -- all at the highest (doctoral) level. This isn't deceptive mass marketing to naive 19-year-old kids who are a few months out of high school. The (few) people who are admitted to SBMI are very intelligent biomedical scientists, who are equipped with previous college degrees and very high reading comprehension and analytical skills.

If you think that SBMI is being "unethical", then file a complaint with WASC. But my guess is that WASC won't care.

 

Actually, I do not care either. So WASC and I have something In common. All l did was echoed your sentiment that not all candidates are granted accreditation. You have made a passionate argument for Sandford-Birnham marketing as wasc accredited even though it is not as yet. I guess, if you do not have a conflict of interest, then your opinion is fact. I yeild.

 

I'm sure there are cases where schools have advertised their accreditation status in a misleading or deceptive manner. However, Sanford-Burnham is not an ordinary unaccredited school, as shown by this recent news story:

Institutions that conduct Nobel Prize-level research get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to questions of academic legitimacy.

 

WASC Accreditation
My bad, I just assumed it was unaccredited before I saw WASC accreditation. My apology.