Central University of Nicaragua Degree Scheme

It's all Greek to....never mind.

 

Yeah, it IS pretty. Reading is a beautiful thing -- and so are alphabets. SO many of them! I've been fascinated with alphabets since I was a kid. When I was 12, I went to my first Latin class. The teacher knew many languages and before we learned any Latin, he taught us the language families of the world, and the story of our own alphabet - through Phoenician - Greek - Roman and onward. He taught us the Greek and Hebrew alphabets. This was Grade 9. Out of all the teachers I had in High School, this man is the one I have to thank most. He kindled a life-long interest. Mr. John Allan Trussler. He has passed on, now - but he's not forgotten. A great teacher -and a good man.

 

I would argue that that is generally a profoundly good thing!

 

It's important to not lose sight of what's most important about education, and that's learning.

There are good schools and bad schools everywhere in the world. No matter what region of the world a student chooses to get that education from, including their own home country, it's up to each individual student to research the program they're interested in to see if it has the reputation of quality and the program offering that fits their needs.

I've read people saying that they have no intention of putting a foreign degree on their resume, and they took the program for the knowledge and for the credits that can be used post-evaluation. What one does with it in that way is an individual choice, but there is a lot of money to be saved. I've seen programs from good schools in foreign countries cost $2000 or as little as $600, while a comparable program in the U.S. can be $40,000 or more. If you do the proper research, you can find what you need for your individual situation.

 

It's amazing to me how many people are unwilling or unable to do research when it comes to higher ed. programs.

The same people who research a car purchase for weeks, think nothing of forking out a significant sum for education - to a place they know nothing about (except it's comparatively cheap, perhaps.) They're like people who bought Yugos in the 80s and regretted it later. It's been going on here since the early 2000s when a group of people who should have known better, enthused about new Universities in the Indian State of Chhatisgarh (enough h's?) which were charging as low as a couple of hundred dollars a year. Enthusiasm waned, when the State Government of Chhatisgarh de-accredited and ordered closed all 27 of the "bargain" Universities.

It continues today. People here hype schools thousands of miles away as a trial balloon. They recommend them, putting out the info that the school is cheap and don't vet it further. A few here have to do the research - or none gets done. People should pre-qualify their own recommendations. No more "Haha, lol, I charge you, reader with checking this school out." HELL NO! I don't want to weed out any more schools run by terrorists or whoever. Don't particularly want to see people lose money either - but I'm flexible on that one.

Nobody should be be surprised if people who sit back and say "is this thing any good" end up having to find out for themselves. Whoever floated the idea isn't going to lift a finger -- and at some point, maybe nobody is. It is no wonder at all, to me, that the US has a student debt problem nearing $2 Trillion.

Impulse buying on steroids.

 

Sorry, but I challenge this, particularly in this forum.

If you gave degree students a choice--get an education or get a degree--which do you think most would choose? You can get an education in many places; you go to a university to get a degree.

I'm not taking a stand on this question, and I appreciate the need to emphasize learning. (I do it all the time when talking about what the learning can do for you beyond the degree earned.) But I wouldn't kid myself about the real answer to that question.

 

If that's true, Rich, and I strongly suspect it is - in a large majority of cases, then many of those that make that choice have to get smarter about the investigation of the possibilities available. That's where the learning is going to have to start, for them. Things might go badly for them in their search, if they sit back and rely on others to do all the footwork. What if the others ... won't?

Degrees aren't like cars, guitars or some guys' girlfriends. If you've got degree problems, you can't always go right out and get another one.

 

No kidding, in fact I'll take that challenge a step further by saying most probably don't care about the degree nor the learning, they only care about some sort of financial payoff, and who can blame them when that part is so heavily promoted. Luckily, when going into a collegiate program the possibility of attaining all three is on the table.

 

Well, we get a lot of chatter that makes it clear a lot of people covet the title "doctor" even if it brings neither learning nor a financial payoff.

I think that's why we see so little discussion about content and delivery methods.

 

Where going off on an interesting tangent.

I'd guess that a larger percentage of students going into college right out of high school are more interested in the learning aspects of the education than students going to college in later years. For example, just based on my own experience, I took lots of classes just for the learning the first few years. Things like cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, art, etc. I suspect older students in general are more focused on their degree and getting a job based on that degree.

 

There's a PhD. diss. from Universidad Central de Nicaragua discussed in this thread.
https://www.degreeinfo.com/index.php?threads/doctor-of-management-dm-42-credits-tracs-about-16k-usd.61242/page-6#post-571544

The writing reminds me of a Diss. I read from a Belford U. "Doctor" years ago. Belford was one of the first of 300+ Axact (Pakistan) fraud schools, that have been selling diplomas by the bushel for at least 15 years now. The very definition of degree mill. NO legit school should be accepting stuff like this.

Years ago, I still believe, UCN was 100% legit and some Americans, a couple of whom post here, earned legit degrees at a great discount from US prices - and it was all good. I still respect these people and their degrees. About seven or eight years ago, we had a multi-page thread that again established that UCN was legit. We had accounts from on-the-ground posters, living in Nicaragua at the time. There was one thing that troubled me - the number of partnerships, collaborations and dual and triple degrees that UCN took part in. I thought they might be troublesome. Now, they are - really so.

A lot of those partnerships were with largely unaccredited low-end schools - Swiss Cantonal, etc. UCN was putting its imprimatur on programs of schools that couldn't hold a candle to UCN itself. I think UCN is still doing this. Back then, there was a guy I think of as the "partnership engineer." IIRC he was an Austrian national. I have forgotten his name, temporarily, but I know he was once on UCN administrative staff, and his job was developing these partnerships - which he was crazy good at! So many of them! He built a whole career on it, I think - dup. and triple degree programs.

Now those partnerships are coming home to roost.

 

It's hard to know to what extent this is true, but some people truly believe they've earned--or deserve--the doctorate they by from a diploma mill. This question was part of an article John Bear wrote a couple of decades ago about whether such purchasers were "villains" or "victims."

As long-time readers will recall, we had a poster here in the early days who had written a book on a particular species of animal about which he'd developed an expertise. (No one seriously doubted this person's expertise and prominence in his field of practice.) Anyway, he shopped that book to a diploma mill who sold him a doctorate. (It was commonly accepted that the business who sold him the degree would have done so without the book, but I digress.) When he naively touted that degree in this community--first on the alt.education.distance Usenet and later on this board when the Usenet denizens migrated here--he was ridiculed savagely. Not at first, of course, but when he decided to go down swinging, others were willing to take him down. But it didn't end there.

For some inexplicable reason, he "upgraded" to another diploma mill, repeating the process. As you can imagine, everyone piled on. The main criticisms were (1) a book isn't a dissertation, (2) the work wasn't supervised, (3) neither mill had any capability to judge work in his field, and (4) neither mill had any degree-granting authority whatsoever. This was true with both mills.

What I liked best about the story is how often his degree was accepted uncritically in professional situations. It was a prime example of why diploma mills work: people don't look, don't know, and don't care. I'm not saying this is the case with UCN, but there are parallels. We can do all the "inside baseball" we want about what is and is not accredited, acceptable, propio, "own degrees," and whatever. But, ultimately, these are largely distinctions without a difference. In most situations, one's degree claims are accepted uncritically, without question or verification. Until they're not, right Misters Meadows and Walker?

 

Rich said: "What I liked best about the story is how often his degree was accepted uncritically in professional situations."

Recruiters tend to quite ignorant about university qualifications. The type of stuff that you will sometimes hear from them is astounding. This happens across Europe and North America. I once had a casual conversation with a Polish recruiter in large city firm, who told me that when he receives a pile of applications, he only looks for graduates of a specific university of economics in Warsaw, the one that he graduated from (The Warsaw School of Economics), because that’s the one he can trust and apparently he received an excellent education there. Applications from people with degrees that didn’t come from the Warsaw School of Economics were thrown into a trash can. He claimed that no university will ever compare to his pet university. I was shocked that such an irresponsible person is deciding the fate of people’s careers.

But sometimes, I have mercy on recruiters, knowing that the world of higher education can indeed be confusing to people who don’t spend a significant amount of time learning about the fine distinctions.

Check out this Harvard page and put yourself in the place of the average recruiter. Let’s pretend that we’re not dealing with a well-known thinker, Radosaw Sikorski, who frequently makes appearances on CNN. What impression would you get from reading this Polish politician’s profile in the education section? Would you think that he has earned a Master’s degree at a top university?

https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/people/radosław-sikorski

It states: “Sikorski graduated from the University of Oxford with a B.A. and an M.A. in politics, philosophy and economics.”

When a recruiter hears about someone “graduating from a university with an MA”, he would most likely get the distinct impression that the person studied a specific Master’s degree program and managed to graduate. The person without an extensive background in international education would not know that “I graduated from the University of Oxford with an M.A.” actually means the following: “After my graduation from a Bachelor’s degree at Oxford, I’ve waited for a period 7 years and then paid the sum total of 10 British pounds to my alma mater in order to receive another undergraduate-level title called “Master of Arts”, a purely customary title, which did not require any additional study or examination.”

Is it any surprising that even British employers do not know much about these type of degree distinctions?

“In 2000, research by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education showed that 62% of employers were unaware that the Cambridge MA did not represent any kind of postgraduate achievement involving study. The same survey found widespread ignorance amongst employers regarding university-level qualifications in general: 51% believed the Edinburgh MA to be a postgraduate qualification, 22% were unaware that a Doctorate in Business Administration was a higher qualification than an undergraduate Diploma of Higher Education, and 40% thought that a BA or BSc was a postgraduate degree.” (Wikipedia).

 

Indeed, had a very well known figure in my industry that had a couple mill Phd's and can't say how often he was billed as Dr. or the PhD used in conferences etc.

He and I were on a industry standards board together a few years ago and at odds, I called him Mister and he lost his mind demanding I call him Doctor. I replied when he manages to get a legitimate one I would be happy to. As this stuff does, half the board were glad I called him on it (they wouldn't) and half the board just felt I was a bully for calling him on it.

 

I usually stay away from these claims. In a couple of situations, I've received blow-back for bringing it up to owning institutions. It's just not worth it. I really don't care what people claim or call themselves. And you can be sued for tortious interference for an issue that doesn't really affect you personally. Pass.

 

This is an element of CRT: conformity bias. We sometimes have an inclination to hire people like us. We're not purposely discriminating (like this person was), but we create discriminatory results anyway.

 

The action is not irresponsible because of the fate of people's careers. I think the best way to look at this kind of thing is from the perspective of the employer. As long as he's recruiting good employees for the open positions the harm is negligible. The problem is that he's likely sometimes discarding candidates that are much better qualified for the open positions. This is irresponsible to hire less qualified individuals because he's not doing his best to make his employer successful.

 

I can see that. It is one of those instances where we know what a mill is but how to prove that. If the person didn't commit fraud with the degree but are using a degree legally earned from an institution authorized to issue that particular degree then wording of the attack on the person's credentials may matter in court. How do you prove that. For instance, I have seen people claiming that people who hold degrees from Louisiana Baptist University hold diploma mill credentials and "bought them" (bought the paper). Go to court on that with someone whose reputation and livelihood has been damaged. It is a demonstrably false claim. LBU requires actual course work and I believe have even gotten rid of Life Experience credit at the graduate and doctoral level. They require a dissertation at the doctoral level and final coursework in person before graduation. As you note, the inside baseball stuff about substandard qualitative requirements and faculty credentials making it not on par with an equivalent accredited degree, may be lost on a judge or jury (especially with an exemption and your initial claim being demonstrably false).

 

I think you are talking about Gerhard Berchtold. He has been hard to reach for the past couple of years. He once emailed me a year later on one email because he had been ill as I was trying to enroll in UCN but chose Azteca/UCN dual program instead. Yes these partnerships are coming to an end. My hope is they grandfather everyone end that is already enrolled and still obtain a positive foreign credential evaluation.