Degree from UMUC: is it appropriate not to mention that it's from UC?

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by notfound123, Jun 5, 2008.

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  1. not4profit

    not4profit Active Member

    I dont know dude. UMUC is a decent school. It is also pretty well known throught the DC/MD area. If you find yourself applying for jobs in those areas you are taking a big risk. As a prior federal hiring official in the DC area, I can say it would be a problem if you were discovered to have done that.

    I also think about what you are also implying relayed to the school within UMD. If you are a CJ major you are claiming to have a degree from a top 5 CJ program. If you have a business degree, you are taking credit for AACSB accreditation instead of, at best, ACBSP accreditation.

    As a UMUC graduate I struggled with the name as well. I settled on University of MD - University College.
     
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  2. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Just stop. Even if you weren't trying to justify lying on your resume, UMGC's headquarters is in Adelphi and its academic center is in Largo. Neither of these is College Park.
     
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  3. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Necromance a 3-year-old thread with that?

    To summarize, if you attended a branch of a university, it's okay to say you graduated from that university. An example would be the Burlington campus of Northeastern University, whose main campus is in downtown Boston.

    But if you graduate from a separate university within a university system, you graduated from there, not the flagship school. An example would be UC Riverside versus the U of California (located in Berkeley). If you went to UC Riverside, you did NOT graduate from the University of California, or "Cal," or "Berkeley."

    BTW, UMUC changed its name.
     
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  4. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    That's downright unethical, if not fraudulent.

    Maybe you need to educate yourself some more in the area of grammar and proofreading.
     
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  5. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    What a way to come into the forum...commenting on a 3 year old thread and then openly saying you are okay with fraudulently representing your education credentials.
     
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  6. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    - I once visited my aunt in Oxford, Connecticut.

    - This trip happened when I was single.

    - On that trip, I ran out of antiperspirant.

    Therefore, I completed my bachelor's Degree at Oxford!
     
    Last edited: Jul 17, 2020
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  7. Courcelles

    Courcelles Active Member

    I’m not going to earn my MBA from “The University of Texas”. Without qualification, that is in Austin. Nor would it be ethical to list “The University of Texas; Odessa, TX”, though that’s at least a tiny step closer to ethical only in that a highly versed observer would know that’s not the main campus. In either case, if someone tries to verify my status by calling Austin, they would rightly be told they had never heard of me! And I’d look, again rightly, like a damned fraud.

    What you’re doing is even worse than just leaving off everything after the state name. By putting College Park, you are committing outright fraud. At least if you just put “Adelphi, MD” an intelligent observer would be able to figure it out.

    If you’re trying to hide where you earned your degree, you should have picked a different school. And neither my UTPB or your UMGC are things to be embarrassed about. And most everyone is familiar with the general concept of branch campuses.
     
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  8. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    That Oxford one has me rolling! Lol
     
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  9. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    :) Not gonna lie, I'm a little proud of that one ;)

    I edited the first one out because I didn't think it was as effective.
     
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  10. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    What the heck kind of logic is this? Lol
     
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  11. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    Troll logic. It was pretty obvious from his first post that he wasn't here for serious reasons, but he hadn't technically broken any rules until he went for the ad hominem.

    I'm a bit sad that he did. It was entertaining for a minute, at least.

    EDIT: I accidentally permanently deleted all his posts during the process of banning him. Whoops.
     
    JoshD likes this.
  12. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    I thought you guys didn't do that? Can I have that?
     
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  13. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    Let's peel back the curtain a bit.

    Due to some backend problems with this forum software, the only way to ban a user is to mark a post as spam, which pulls up a menu of options for how to respond. In that menu, there is one little checkbox hiding in a list of about a dozen that is checked off by default and that permanently erases everything the user has ever done. If a mod forgets to uncheck it *poof* it all goes the way of the dodo.

    It's an agressive anti-spam feature. It's intended to be used against accounts that bombard the board with ads. It's rather prone to user error as we've seen in this instance.
     
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  14. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Yes, that. May I have it?
     
  15. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    Let's see if I understand this . . . You're asking MC to grant you the right (which no one else has) to delete every embarrassing and asinine comment you've made on this forum for the past 20 years? Every patronizing insult that has passed from you to countless users who didn't deserve your condescending comments?

    I think I would oppose that notion. It's far more entertaining to see you make an ass of yourself, Rich, and those precious moments should never be lost to Internet history.
     
  16. Steve Levicoff

    Steve Levicoff Well-Known Member

    What the hell. Since I'm here . . .

    At one time, the headquarters of then-UMUC was located in College Park – they had a large building on or just adjacent too the UMCP campus. Their facility had classrooms, a conference center, and a hotel – in fact, one of the three Union Institute seminars I attended for a week was held at UMUC.

    The move to Adelphi (next door to College Park) was simply because they outgrew their College Park facility. At the time I was there (some 30 years ago), UMUC was just a general and commuter college and had not yet grown to the national or international stature it holds today. (In fact, when I was there, online programs as we know them now did not even exist.)

    But back to the topic of this thread, I recently ran across the bio of a Union Institute graduate who earned his Ph.D. in developmental psychology. At the time, he was a full-time professor in a graduate counseling program in the metro Philly area.

    The bio I recently read on him identified his Ph.D. as being in developmental psychology and marriage & family counseling. That’s bad enough, but it also said that he had earned his Ph.D. at Union University, not the Union Institute or even UI&U. I later ran across a second bio on him that made the same falsification.

    The guy is now in Tennessee, and the most well known Union University in the country happens to be in Jackson, TN. (Union, like Trinity, is a common name for both colleges and universities, as well as a seminary or two.) Obviously, people who read his bio in Tennessee are going to assume that he earned his Ph.D. from the school in Jackson, not UI&U in Cincinnati.

    It almost makes me wish that I was still in the mill-busting biz – I’d sling this guy up by the short hairs for his falsification. What ticks me off even more is that I served on his doctoral committee at the Union Institute, having graduated a few years before he did, and he taught at a school at which I would have held him to a higher ethical standard.

    Bottom line: People have fragile egos, and you always have to be on the watch for bullshit (even here on DI). And yes, they deserve to be busted. (Not to mention that it’s lots of fun to do so.)
     
  17. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    He wasn't just a full-time professor. He was the Senior VP and Provost. You must be really old to have sat on his committee. :D
     
  18. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    Hi, Steve! Good to hear from you.
     
  19. franklyeasy

    franklyeasy New Member

    Definitely a troll, good riddance.

    However, some interesting points for us to ponder were raised.

    Think about when you or I go to a store to purchase mustard, olive oil, or tissue paper. Even for said inconsequential trinkets there are well defined, structured, international regulations conforming size, origin and even tartness. Now consider the vital role that CVs and resumes play in the essential, and often critical, process of organizational hiring. Shouldn't the formation, clarity and structure of said documents follow some sort of widely agreed upon set of standards in order to, amongst other benefits, ensure that employers aren't duped or mislead in their hiring decisions? Something as simple as requiring career and educational completion and achievement codes, as they often do in government hiring or internationally in countries with very large, educated talent pools such as China and India, instead of names/locations would be a step in the right direction.

    Something else more relevant to this posting to consider; don’t reputable institutions do themselves a great disservice with these transparent money grabs posing as flexible online satellite off-shoot colleges? Many well-regarded schools have started such loosely affiliated programs, either from the ground up or by purchasing a local CC or for-profit to operate thru, often utilizing a similar (deceivingly so I would argue) sounding school name to attract applicants. I am awfully familiar with many of these off-shoots and unfortunately have observed that they are generally by no means academically rigorous either from an admission or completion standpoint. If I were a bonafide graduate of Purdue, University of Illinois or University of Maryland, I’d be absolutely furious that my Alma Mater is allowing the value of my diploma to be, potentially, grossly diluted by unethical charlatans such as our recently banned contributor posing as fellow alum.


    Here’s the problem as I see it, the commonly used currency in the societal pillars of employment and education are becoming easy to fudge and therefore losing their value to the point of worthlessness. Stranger still is that this is an anomaly in an otherwise highly organized and regulated nation like the US. I couldn’t sell burgers and call them “beef burgers” if they weren’t at least 51% beef, McDonald’s can’t call their shakes “milkshakes” since they’re not dairy based. In fact, I can't even call myself a "Professional Engineer" on a business card unless I have a PE licence. Yet any of us can land a six-figure job managing God knows what important task just by exaggerating a PDF to present our education and experience positively enough, regardless of actual accomplishments?! Is it time to seriously reconsider the value of a college diploma and the credential-weighted hiring process?

    I know I'm going way off tangent here, but as a generally more-educated demographic of forum contributors, I would love to know what your thoughts are on this issue.

    Thank you.
     
    Last edited: Jul 19, 2020
  20. not4profit

    not4profit Active Member

    Academia is a strange duck. I have an EdD that, for all intents and purposes, was a PhD back when I did it. Now the department of Ed officially converts the EdD to a professional degree and the value of my degree is further limited (despite nothing actually changing with degree requirements). I see a strange combination of regulation a reputation as the foundation of higher ed programs and loopholes abound.

    I also think your post is yet another indicator that money, laws, power, education, authority, and everything else in life is paper thin and problematic without ethics or morals to back it up.
     

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