Columbia Pacific "upgrade" to Columbia Commonwealth

Hi Bruce,
My only intention here is to post the facts as I have them pertaining to the transfer degree program. I was out of the country in June (Estonia, and Russia), logged on to this site from Estonia, and was seriously amazed to discover the posting on the 15 page paper. Especially since Carr had discussed the matter with me for almost 3 months and there was never any discussion of anything less that 50 pages. I was playing hard ball during those talks with Carr and suggesting 100-150 pages. I figure that any Masters or Ph.D. grad who can't knock off 100 + pages with some research doesn't deserve the degree in the first place and CPU should demand it be returned (providing it was worth anything).

My understanding from earlier talks I have had with Dr. Carr of CCU
is that CCU wanted to find a way to help the CPU grads who graduated after June, 1997 (their degrees were not legally approved). I think from a marketing perspective it was also in their best interests. There was a lot of flack being directed at CPU from many directions including alumni (particularly the denizens that call http://www.altcpualumni.org home) and for 5-6 years there was little information coming out of CPU (partly due to litigation, partly due to diminished resources, and partly beacuse they were in shock).

At the same time, Carr explained, CCU was tightening up its programs and any degree transfer program had to be done first of all in a satisfactorily legal manner, and then in a credible manner pertaining to educational standards (Carr has headed two RA schools). Some examples were found of RA schools who changed names and simply ugraded the grads to a new diploma with the new name. But CCU was in a different set of circumstances in that CPU was unapproved as of 6/1997 so there had to be some work involved to address both that fact and the fact that standards were now different. Also CCU was a different legal entity. Another thing was the cost of a mentor, the administrative costs, etc. Carr told me that CCU was not in any financial position to refrain from charging a break-even fee.

There is also some kind of legitimate accreditation thing curently going on with CCU (beyond Malawi - and I know what's legit and what's not). I'm not sure exactly what at this point. I do know they are very busy and they are tightening up programs, and Carr has been telling his people to be thinking "accreditation" with any and every move they make (I have seen some emails).

I have recently pointed out some of what I would call "Mickey Mouse" discrepancies pertaining to the CCU website and Carr took swift action to delegate changes once I notified him. I guess it's still a wait-and-see game.

I'm not involved with CCU as a student (I've started some other stuff, including HW). But I am offering Carr some input on cleaning up their image - "Clean it up! Get accreditation!". I continue to do research on the CPU/CPPVE debacle and Carr keeps turning documents over to me. That's really all I can say at this moment. When I get new information I will post it.
Thanks,
Earon

 

Earon, isn't this like buying an Edsel Ford (am I showing my age?) with mag wheels?



------------------
Peter French,
MEd MAcc (UNE) CMA
Australia

 

Pete,
A most humorous comment indeed!
I've alsways maintaned that this forum and its predecessor are similar to a group of guys standing around in a circle talking about their souped up cars, carbs, mufflers, and mags, and who makes the best products. Maybe, coming originally from blue collar world, that's why I like it.
Cheers,
Earon

 

I don't understand the point, besides making the owners of CPU/CCU $775 richer. What advantage is there to a graduate in doing this? Why would a CCU diploma be any more desirable than a CPU diploma?

 

I would guess that the Malawi accreditation is perceived to have value. To whom, I don't know. Also, Earon related that this "upgrade" is only available to those who received their degrees after the 1997 order from California to close. Perhaps this is a way to ensure that those customers after that order receive legally issued degrees?

Rich Douglas, wondering if Carr even remembers what it was like to work in an accredited environment.

 

This is slightly off-topic, but after reading more of the sometimes painful history of Columbia Pacific, both on this board and on Earon's website, I keep coming back to the question of whether some of these legitimate/serious/sincere/whatever unaccredited schools can move towards accreditation. Could slightly more flexibility on the part of both the schools and the accreditors make for a meeting of the minds, or are talking miles apart here?

Within legal education, challenges to ABA accreditation standards have had the effect of (1) alas, not doing much for the schools bringing the challenges, but (2) having the residual effect benefitting other less traditional schools by pushing the ABA to be less hidebound and inflexible about their standards.

As a lawyer I like to think of litigation as a last resort, but I'm wondering if some legal saber rattling could help some of the better non-RA schools over the line, and in the process make the accreditation process more meaningful *and* open. It's clear that the Calif. approval process is not a guarantor of quality for degree-granting programs, and the CPU situation raises legitimate issues of fairness. So maybe if the regional accreditors are more hospitable to non-traditional, esp. DL programs, that would take care of the problem.

 

As a lawyer myself, I agree that litigation should be a LAST resort. Nevertheless, I wonder exactly whom one would sue. The accrediting agencies are non governmental and they aren't engaging in discrimination against "suspect" categories. The schools are "victims"(?) in their own right...the MLS v. ABA suits were nearly complete failures, as has been pointed out...I guess the defendants would be those state agencies that refuse to grant professional licenses to holders of unaccredited degrees, agencies that forbid the use of unaccredited degrees and titles, and those lenders that rely on accreditation to make their lending decisions...
It wouldn't be easy.
Joybaum

 

Perhaps on paper it appears that the Massachusetts School of Law antitrust lawsuit against the ABA has been a failure in that MSL still has not been able to get accreditation. But other schools have benefitted because the suit forced the ABA to be more flexible in its accreditation standards. There are law schools that will get accreditation today that wouldn't have been able to do so before MSL sued the ABA.

The legal theories against accreditors would go toward restraint of trade. I agree -- it's a tough argument to win -- but innovative and non-traditional schools have used the argument with slow-as-molasses success to get accreditors to unstuff themselves.

 

David,
I haven't kept up on the WASC standards (for those who do not know, Western Association of Schools and Colleges is the regional accreditor for California, Hawaii and some other western states). But I continue to think that WASC will not consider accreditation of schools with no residency. There are exceptions, but only if the main programs are residency-based (consider CIIS who started accreditation with residency and later opened an experimental online program. CIIS is still primarily residency-based - someone correct me if this has changed in any way).

Columbia Pacific had planned to be the first challenge to WASC's regulations on residency (as a non-residential school)as early as 1993. CPU had organized to make an application as early as 1995. CPU's strategic plan included a move to non-profit status (which they unsuccessfully attempted), establishment of an alumni board of governors and alumni trustees (which they did establish but it then disinteregated some years after the non-approval, and an addition of more onsite full-time faculty. There was also investigation into developing a short-term residency (possibly as a contingent if accreditation was outrightly refused). All of the above went down the toilet as the CPPVE decision of 1995 to no longer approver CPU kept them from applying for accreditation with WASC. WASC regulations require full California approval prior to being considered for accreditation. I have documents to support all of the above and will get them online soon.

I personally consider the CPPVE as it was run by its directors Ken Miller and Sheila Hawkins (1991-1997) to be a renegade sham that perpetrated an ongoing vendetta against California schools. Governor Gray Davis agreed with this view and closed down the CPPVE by decree in 1996. I consider the BPPVE also to be a sham which keeps California-approved schools at a lower than standard level of "university" education, and allows some shady operations to continue. Rich Douglas has some information to support this claim. Read the BPPVE regulations and you will understand this.

Current perception of California-approval is not that great (at least here). So why have such approval in the first place - to allow a sub-quality of education to be available with out having to develop towards accreditation? There is little room in California for non-constrained curriculum development without having accreditation. It seems to me that the original intention of the 1989 private postsecondary education reform act - to clean up the California education scene as recommended by Stewart and Spille in their 1988 "Diploma Mills: Degrees of Fraud" and an associated lobby, has not fully been realized. Stewart and Spille claimed that California's system was giving RA distance ed schools a bad reputation. What the 1989 reform act did allow for was to put out of business and taint the reputation of certain large schools (CPU, Kennsington) who presented serious threats to RA schools' enrollment numbers, particularly nontraditional schools such as Union Institute, Thomas Edison, and others. Some of these institutions were mentioned by Stewart and Spille in their book, which was published by the American Council on Education and Macmillan.

A TUI prof specializing in religion (not Levicoff - but doesn't it seem familiar)participated on the largely bogus visiting committee that delivered a largely flawed report of CPU in 1995. All reports prior to 1995 were much more positive and considered CPU's curriculum and administrative functions akin to those of regionally accredited universities. The reports are all online at http://www.altcpualumni.org (serious readers only, please). Follow the links. The 1991 site visit report which again concluded CPU was akin to regionally accredited schools can be temporarily found at
http://www.altcpualumni.org/chronicles/cppve1991.pdf

I don't want to look like I am defending CPU but I believe the accurate document-based story must get out into the public consciousness so that they themselves can be the judge based on accurate information. Personally speaking, I would not advise taking programs from any California-approved school, because there is a question of credibility within the whole approval system, particulary in the manner it flip flops thru time and in the manner that it seems to be easily influenced (I hope to have more on this soon).

Earon Kavanagh
(who has researched the CPU/CPPVE fiasco for six years)

 

Correction: The California governor who in 1996 vetoed legislation to keep the CPPVE in existence for another five years was Pete Wilson ("CPPVE" stands for California Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education). The Assembly had passed the legislation 70-1. The Governor raised serious concerns about how the CPPVE was being run and what kind of renegade activities it was engaged (he used the term "waging a pattern of reprisals" against California institutions).
Earon
(who has been actively reseaching this matter for six years and is actively publishing related documents online for the public to view).

 

Earon, thank you for the clarification. I may have garbled my main point, and that is that we should focus on the regional accreditors rather than continuing to bash what most agree is a very imperfect Calif. approval process. One reason, maybe the biggest reason, why we have the whole Calif. approval mess is that WASC is one of the least flexible of the regional accreditation agencies. It won't accredit completely non-residential programs, and it won't consider schools of under 100 students. One could speculate that had WASC been more open to non-traditional institutions during the 1970s through the present, much of the recent and not-so-recent angst over California approval would've been unnecessary.

It's an interesting and unfortunate accident: California, in higher education as in many activities, is a spawning ground of innovative, cutting-edge approaches, some of which catch fire, others of which crash and burn. And yet its regional accreditor is one of the least hospitable in the country to innovation. What happens as a result? The California approval situation.

I may be overly simplistic in my read of the situation, but I think there's a strong kernal of truth in it.

 

David,
I think that there is a strong kernal of truth in what you are stating. But, as with most sensitive topics, particularly distance and nontraditional education, it needs to be backed up with sound historical research of documents to triangulate it as a kernal of truth. Sadly, we have yet to see any serious research on these matters come out of the distance ed camps. That alone should speak to some degre of why distance education continues to remain suspect outside of the traditional institutions who have been delivering it for decades.
Earon

 

Hi, David. I agree with you about the desirability of WASC becoming more progressive. I would *love* to see California become a real DL innovator.

And I agree that the CA-approved university sector is apparently the weird intersection of 70's-style California alternative culture and WASC conservatism. But that idea works better for distance education than for alternative education as a whole.

WASC is kind of an interesting phenomenon. They are actually rather innovative when it comes to accrediting non-traditional on-campus institutions. The list is long: CIIS, the Wright Institute, ITP, JFK, Fielding, Pacifica and many more. They recently accredited the American Conservatory Theater in SF to offer masters degrees in theater arts. The American Film Institute in LA is a candidate for its own graduate program. I think Saybrook was residential when it started, but it may have slipped into the totally DL category since, I'm not sure.

In other words, there is a whole galaxy of small independent graduate institutes in California that you really don't find elsewhere. Some academic traditionalists (even on this group) are having trouble coming to terms with them, especially when they offer distance doctorates. But that's part of California's job I guess: expanding the envelope in so many ways.

But as you say, WASC seems to change gears abruptly when it comes to DL-only schools. Suddenly they are in reverse, and the North Central Association takes over as the innovator.

I really don't understand it. It can't be the small and specialized nature of the schools, because they already favor schools like that. And it can't be the DL medium itself, because they happily approve of DL programs offered by schools with on-campus programs.

Perhaps their policy isn't supposed to make sense, but is the result of a political compromise between two powerful factions. But whatever it is, I wish they would lead distance education rather than follow.

 

Earon, good point about the need for research to document these developments.

And Bill, you're right -- when it comes to WASC we need to distinguish between residential and primarily DL programs.

Who woulda thunk that North Central and the Midwest would become the leader in DL and accreditation?!