Big mouth DETC challenge

I'm sure there are many of these success stories out there. No one contests that. It is the people who want to claim equivalency that are over-stating things.

Congratulations on your success.

 

I'm also happy that it's worked out well for you but your argument is more than a little bit like the "Bill Gates argument" which goes like this.

person 1 - Bill Gates doesn't have a college degree and that shows that college degrees are unnecessary.

person 2 - Bill Gates is clearly an exception in terms of his raw intelligence, creativity, drive, etc. If you are one of the few people in the world who can match him in those areas then perhaps you don't need a degree either. However, playing the odds, you are far more likely to find success by earning a degree.

 

Um, okay...

Did you read my post?

Not the part where I misspelled the word...the rest of it.

 

First, Mr. Edwards is asking for information from the various accreditation bodies and to discuss them. He has provided a link for DETC.

Fourth, yes in the past DETC has violated it own rules, but have not different RA's also done this?

We all know that in academia DETC is not going to get you in the door to teach, only professors and instructors at community colleges and possibly small colleges can use DETC degrees to advance themselves, but not get in the door.

The federal government many state and local governments accept DETC for many positions.

In the private sector, it depends, some will and some will not. The private sector is becoming more selective in what they will accept. For an entry level position DETC would probably not be your best choice in many cases, to move up and/or get a raise DETC may very well be acceptable.

For transfer of credits or degree acceptance for admission from a DETC school, it depends on the school. Some will, some will not. Then again some RA schools do not accept credits from other RA schools.

Is DETC as good as RA, in some ways no, but it depends on your circumstances and goals. If you have to pay out of pocket and your employer will accept a DETC/NA degree it may be a better route for some. This is not a one size fits all issue.

 

You've got 700 posts on this board. Have you been following this debate for the past 10 years?

 

OK, name 3.

 

In other words, nothing.

Examples, please.

Red herring. No one is protesting that, nor using that fact as an issue in this debate.

Right. Everyone acknowledges this. It is accounted for.

Right. No one seems to be arguing against this.

You have absolutely no basis for making this assertion. If you have evidence that supports it, please offer it. You might be right, but your post doesn't support it.

This is misleading. The first part is accurate. But the second part....not so much. The lack of acceptance regarding degrees from DETC-accredited schools is not a school-by-school decision. It is a matter of policy. Some have this policy while others do not. But no RA school has a policy denying acceptance of credits from other RA schools. Each school may make independent decisions about other RA schools, but the don't lock them out as a category. Yet some do lock out credits and degrees from DETC-accredited schools. This distinction is critical, and yet you blur it like so many other posters.

Yes, it depends. Many graduates of schools accredited by DETC have enjoyed acceptance of their degrees. No one--NO ONE!--says it's a "one size fits all issue."

This is tedious.

 

That probably has more to do with the degree requirements or the age of the credits i.e. it's not a regional accreditation issue. For example, only X number of elective credits may transfer into some RA programs -- and it could be zero, if the transfer classes are completely in left field. Also, if credits are over five years old, some universities will not accept them, even if they are regionally accredited.

 

This gets at the silliness of the statement. Could you imagine a situation where an RA school had a policy against accepting credits from RA schools?

Some (we don't know how many) RA schools will not accept credits and degrees from NA schools. The reverse is never true.

 

This guy was already reducing our wide variety of opinion about this stuff to a crude caricature in his second sentence. By his fourth sentence he was insulting us. He's just a troll and he's trying to push people's buttons and get us battling each other. (I'm contemptuous of trolls.)

 

It so happens that one of the most authoritative figures in a field of great interest to me (an academic field in which doctoral programs exist) has (to my knowledge) no academic degrees at all. Nevertheless, he's been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and lectures regularly at other universities. His training in his field was, let's say, unconventional (many years in Thai monasteries).

So I think that my clear and definite reply to the "Bill Gates argument" is... it depends.

It depends on who the person is, on what his or her extra-university educational experiences have been, and on what he or she intends to do with that education.

(Logically speaking, it isn't universally necessary that individuals possess a degree, even in academic fields. So #1 is technically true. But that doesn't imply that for all individuals, degrees are unnecessary. It just means that some cases (perhaps only a handful) degrees aren't necessary. So #2 is true as well.)

The thing is, the same kind of things are going to be true with DETC programs (or with any program for that matter, whatever its accreditation). Whether or not a particular program (or accreditation or whatever) is advisable is going to depend on who the student is, on why he or she wants to enroll in higher education in the first place, and on what he or she intends to do with the education after receiving it.

Seen in that light, DETC programs work great for some students and not so great for others. Distance learning works great for some students and not so great for others. Low-prestige RA programs work great for some students and not so great for others. It's always going to be that way.

 

Yes, and diploma mills work great for some people and not for others. It, too, will always be that way.

 

As my recent thread outlines, I too was a DETC skeptic, Personally, I am not even sure why I took that stance with NA. What I can tell you is about the one fact that in a small way validated my FORMER way of thinking about DETC, NA, and transferability. (aka its utility)
When I first got into DE, DETC accreditation was IMO way below what one should strive for at the college level. However, I did not have any basis for this reasoning, nevertheless I thought that way for quite a while. Was I dim-witted – yes. at:

Through my years on Degreeinfo.com I have seen many arguments on this very topic, some have become legend! People pushing their RA is superior beliefs and discrediting DETC education as inferior was mostly the mostly the norm with a few folks standing tall for DETC. While not participating in most of these discussions the little voice in my head had me cheering for the RA side.

DETC serves many functions and utility, but not all. My only issue with NA is it’s transferability to RA schools based on their NA accreditation status. The only difference is NA programs don’t employ as many Liberal Arts classes as RA for their degree plans. From what I have seen via my co-workers CSU classes is that the coursework is not inferior in any way to RA.

Personally, now that I am past my misinformation on DETC and CHEA (pet) I just enrolled in an NA Masters program that suites my needs 100%. The accreditation, coursework, and final degree, is perfect. I can’t honestly say that on occasion I don’t “think” about the NA / RA saga but it passes quickly. It’s the threads that have members fighting it out over this subject that sometimes get me thinking, hummmm what if.

I am truly over it; NA is just as cool as RA. There I said it! And for those of you out there reading this at home, hearing that same tiny voice I used to listen to telling you NA is worthless and a lower form of life, “just because” don’t you believe it.

You're here to learn something about Distance Education, yes, well learn about the forefather of Distance Education, DETC.

 

It's true, if we choose to ignore a few annoying things like educational content and ethics.

I don't think that there's anything unethical about people saying that they are graduates of DETC-accredited programs, of distance learning programs or of RA programs that are perceived as weak.

An interesting problem case (I'm always interested in the problem cases) are the academically-sound non-accredited programs. I don't see anything that's inherently unethical about somebody saying that they are a graduate of one of these either.

The problem with these kind of schools arises from the fact that others who aren't already familiar with the school will have no reason to trust that the thing is academically sound. Given the huge number of mills out there, it's probably best that people to treat unknown non-accredited schools as presumptive mills, until they are convinced otherwise.

Nevertheless, I think that academically sound non-accredited schools might be good choices for a small subset of students. This class might include individuals who seek avocational education simply for its own sake (especially if the content of the program is unique), or perhaps students who anticipate only using their degrees in a specialized niche situation where people already know the school. An example of the latter might be a non-accredited seminary that's run by a religious denomination to prepare its own clergy. They will probably prefer graduates of their own school.

 

A more common example might be IT certifications from companies like Cisco or Microsoft. Technically these are not degrees, but nonetheless they are DL credentials that require study and exams, and they are regularly pursued and discussed by degreeinfo members. So they are analogous to degrees.

Presumably these IT certificates are used in technical fields where names like Cisco and Microsoft are well known; it doesn't matter that they lack formal accreditation. So this would be an example of "students who anticipate only using their degrees in a specialized niche situation where people already know the school" -- you just have to substitute the word "certificate" for "degree".

 

Those pesky things! Of course, ignoring them helps sustain the billion-dollar-a-year (estimated, of course) diploma mill industries.

Neither do it.

I've never been an advocate of people putting the lack of accreditation on a resume, for example. That's just silly. The degree, even from an unaccredited school, should stand on its own. However, if the degree was not earned--and that's a dicey thing to pin down a fair standard for "earning" one's degree--then that's a different matter. If you list degrees from unaccredited schools or diploma mills, even, you should sustain the inherent risk.

Good principle. In practice, however, people seldom check or care. That's why the chief nurse of the largest hospital system in my region (and possibly the U.S.) lists her Ph.D. from Kennedy-Western.

Agreed on all points. My favorite is WISR.

 

Also Kona University, formerly American Pacific University. Also, with loss of accreditation effective February 13, Teacher Education University.

 

With the large number of for-profit RA schools, some huge percentage of which are distance-based, and some of whom spend 40% or more of their budget on advertising, it's hard to argue that educational quality is not affected. There have been rumblings from some of the regionals about taking these schools to task for shoddy academic performance, very high drop-out rates, unethical recruiting, and all sorts of other things. So I think it's clear there are some pretty shitty RA schools out there... and if these schools didn't have a ton of money to throw around with bribes, lobbying (which is basically bribing anyway) and God knows what else, I think a lot of such schools would no longer exist.

But the iffy or substandard schools that can't afford to play in the big leagues end up at DETC. And while, on paper, DETC's accreditation standards look just as rigorous as the regionals, in practice that's a joke, because, as Rich pointed out, we've got plenty of evidence of DETC ignoring very obvious violations of their own rules and granting accreditation to schools that should *never* have received it.

To me, the difference is this: While there are some duds within the pool of RA schools, by and large, the peer review process that the regionals follow seems to work reasonably well. I think another piece of the puzzle is the amount of research going on at RA schools (at least, 4 year colleges and universities) vs. DETC schools. While the for-profit RA schools are probably not much better than DETC in this regard, at least we have a large pool of RA schools where new research is going on constantly, and I think the presence of the research activity is at least a part of the major contributor to academic quality. As far as I know, there is very, very little, if any new research going on at DETC schools.

There are probably some very good DETC schools whose academic rigor is comparable to some of the more rigorous RA schools. And there are almost certainly some really shitty RA schools where little-to-no academic rigor exists. But I think if you look at the entire pool, the quality of academic rigor, and therefore education, is likely a lot more rigorous at the RAs than at the DETC schools.

 

What puzzles me is that every time a discussion about NA comes up, it's always about the DETC even though there are other NA bodies.