DL Forum or RA Forum?

Re: My 2¢ . . .

I would like to add that RA graduates are less odoriferious.

 

Re: My 2¢ . . .

Okay. But wealthier? Where the heck was that in the brochure? I've been had!!!!!!!!

 

Amen!

Amen! Amen! I was speaking with a tenured public policy professor at Cal State Hayward some months ago. I started talking about accredited schools in the area offering advanced degrees in Public Administration. I was quite surprised that he thought all schools are accredited once they exist in California. The notion of an unaccredited school wasn't even on his radar.

Let's just get on with it. Arguing the merits of unaccredited degrees every few days is getting old. Let those who choose to defend them keep doing so. We just don't have to take the bait.

 

Hey, even if "wealthier" is questionable, how about safety? We are safer. No time bombs likely to explode in our faces.

 

I think that Rich is right that in the academic and professional worlds, there is litle debate. Accreditation is simply taken for granted. Like Rich says, many people, particularly educators and HR people who should know better, don't have a clue.

But I'm also going to argue that accreditation issues ARE important and really do need to be discussed.

I care... Of course, I'm a nobody.

And that's just the point. Degreeinfo is a *student oriented* board. I went to the 'Chronicle of Higher Education' yesterday to read some posts and they asked for my *institutional affiliation*!

The Chronicle, Penn State and Nova are faculty and administrators' boards that cater to DL professionals. While accreditation is a non-issue to them, things look very different to those of us that actually TAKE the DL classes.

Whether these clowns are aware of it or not, the ***MAJORITY*** of the institutions offering DL doctorates are not accredited. The non-accredited schools stare out at us from Yahoo, from the Economist, from Christianity Today and from everything in between.

The administrators and professors shrug it off as unimportant, but DL students are confronted with this issue every day. We see it over and over here on Degreeinfo: past or current students who enrolled in these things.

If the general public ever comes to equate "distance learning" with "degree mill", then each and every one of us is sunk. That day is coming quicker than people think.

My reply to that is that it's about time that professional educators extract their heads from their butts. But until they do, it's up to us here on Degreeinfo to keep the issue alive.

I think that the accreditation issue goes well beyond consumer protection. It is a subject of considerable inherent intellectual interest:

International accreditation. GAAP. MIGS. Validation arrangements. Liverpool accreditation. NOOSR. Government vs. private. Voluntary vs. mandatory. Institutional vs. specialized. New schools. DETC. Lisbon Convention. Apostiles. State professional licensing. Professional codes of ethics. Religious exemptions. Measures of scholarly productivity. Undergraduate vs. graduate. Credit by examination. ACE recommendations. Residency requirements. Off-shore incorporation. State approvals. Indian tribes. Enforcement mechanisms. Legal liabilities....

And there is the unavoidable fact that not all state approved schools are hopeless. Some of them are very attractive options for some students in some situations. So, which students and which situations are those? How might the better state-approved schools be best utilized? How can these kind of schools find a role where they are doing the most good and the least harm? None of this is an either-or issue.

Our professors and educational theorists are not interested in any of this. So I guess that we need to look out for our own interests as students here on Degreeinfo. Perhaps we could even see this as an *opportunity* to engage in a little grass-roots scholarship of our own. Here is a whole subject, of tremendous importance to the future of DL, that's being handed to us on a plate. If professional educators aren't interested in it, then perhaps our job is to interest them.

I mean, given the number of people that post here, their academic qualifications and their extensive personal experience with DL, Degreeinfo could easily become one of the world's most sophisticated venues for discussion of American and world-wide accreditation issues. Perhaps it already is.

I think that's a tremendously important role to fill.

 

Brandon or Ee:

It seems to me that there is a lot of recent publicity for CCU. I wonder is this Brandon or Ee are legit or just the same person trying to defend the CCU in this forum. The fact is that in the past all these state approved schools like CCU were the only alternatives for people to further their education but presently with tons of RA schools offering online degrees I don’t see why someone will go for CCU to save a few thousand. People here is trying to dissuade others to waist their money, there is a big chance that all these California state approved schools will go to bankrupt in the near future and we don’t want people to invest their money in something that is dying. But some people are just too blind to see the reality or we have some marketing employees of CCU in the group.

Regards,

 

To my mind this comes about as close to the crux of the matter as anything I've read. Persons with DL degrees become accustomed to answering questions such as, "How did you get a degree from a New York university while you were living in California?" Accreditation always plays a role in the answer to these questions and so DL students beome very sensitive to the associated issues. As to the original poster, I would only say this: If you moved to a new town and discovered that an overwhelming majority of your fellow townsfolk held political views quite different than your own, what would you do? It seems to me that the options are quite clear.
Jack

 

I've been saying the same thing for quite awhile. That is why it's important to expose fake schools & fake degree holders, and also to make it clear that there is such a thing are legitimately accredited distance learning programs.


Bruce