From Degree Mill to Accredited Schools

Harvard accepts approx. 30% of applicants and the last figures I saw said U. Cal. Berkeley accepts about 50%. The average ACT at U. Cal is 26.7 and it goes up to 29 at Harvard. For Harvard the freshmen class was in the top 10%of their high school class. If you are in this level and have the money, yes, they'll accept you, and possibly credit from other schools, as it suits them to. Possibly if you don't stir the water much the sharks will ignore you, but I like it well stirred. I like to make people air their real opinions. They won't do that unless you really challenge them. They'll hide behind a facade of fairness until their toes are mashed and then you find out their prejudices, such as all accredited schools are the same-Wonderful and Approved schools= degree mills. RA schools range from bad to good, and everywhere in between. Accredition means that a school meets a minimum standard, not that it offers an excellent education. Why would so many students be trying to get into the "School" if all were viewed as equal?

 

Who else besides you said that they are all equal? What I saw stated was that the job of accreditation was to assure the public and the academic community that minimum standards are meet at the accredited school. It does not even pretend or try to show that they are all equal.

 

UC Berkley's Business school accepts (for MBA and PhD in Business), less than 1 %.

 

Yes, accreditation means that a school has met *minumum* standards. With only a handful of exceptions, unaccredited schools do not meet those standards.

Accredited schools are only viewed as equals in comparison to unaccredited schools.

Sure, your unaccredited school might require a bit of coursework. But the point is, how would anyone who is not an expert in education ever know that? How could they differentiate between a guy printing a completely bogus diploma/trascript on the inkjet in his bedroom from a somewhat more legitimate, but unaccredited school? In the real world, they don't. In general, either they accept both, or they reject both.

Perhaps coins would be good analgoy:

Penny=unaccredited schools
Nickle=local community college
Dime=less presitgious college/university
Quarter=large state/private school
Half Dollar=prestigious school
Silver Dollar=top tier university

Sure, there are HUGE differences between the silver-colored coins. But even the lowest is worth five times more than a penny. And anyone who even takes a glance at the coin they have been handed would notice that. Some people don't look.

If you are counting on people not looking, that's your decision. But don't claim that a penny is a dime. The size might be similar, but we all know the difference.

 

Well maybe not if the person has never seen USA currency.

 

OK, you like to challenge people. Well, I issued a challenge to you, if you recall:

I want to know how you get from observing that accredited schools are not all identical to the conclusion that non-accredited schools should be embraced.

Who ever said that? Rather than making these vague and intangible denunciations of "them", why not respond to specific things that people actually write?

As for myself, I've gone out of my way to say things very different from what you are attacking. When you launch these attacks in my direction (I assume that I'm one of "them") I feel like I'm arguing with shadows.

 

I hate the feeling that a provocateur is setting us against one another.

I've also gone to some effort to set out my own hierarchy of schools in an earlier post. In one sense, I deny that most schools are equal, although I think that their inequalities are far more complex than most people seem to think.

Nevertheless, I am going to argue that there is a strong and real sense in which accredited schools ARE equal.

The regional accreditors are associations of schools that accept each others credits in transfer, and accept each other's degrees for graduate admissions.

For example, when I took calculus at City College of San Francisco years ago, we used Swokowski. It's my understanding that UC Berkeley used Swokowski as well. While a smaller percentage of CCSF students took that course, and a greater percentage dropped out, those that finished it had worked the same problem sets as the Berkeley students had done. Berkeley recognized that equality and unquestioningly accepted CCSF calculus for math and physics major credit at Berkeley.

You see the same kind of thing across the board, so long as schools are accredited. Whether it's Chinese or chemistry, if you take the subject at a "lesser" school, it's still close enough to the syllabus at a "superior" school that the more favored institution will let you transfer it in and give you credit for it.

That's a kind of equality, and one of a fairly strong sort.

 

I agreed with much of your rating system. You say that much of the DL schools are in the #5 group and that most DL's rise to little better than standard. In group #6 you give a good description of the differences between 5 and 6. If this is your view then I don't understand your latter posts. Your rating system is along with my views that schools have great variety. Unaccredited schools range from Degree Mills to a pretty good quality, the DL RA'S go from barely accredited to very good quality. If you see most of the DL'S stopping at #5 you must be acknowledging the variation in quality amongst this group. You have gone to great effort in your system to explain the different levels of schools and I agree with much of what you have said and I noticed several others also agreeing. If these are still your views we are mostly in agreement. In fact what you wrote just after #7 is almost exactly what I've been saying all during the shark attacks.

 

I'm excited by it.

This is true at the individual class level. Although I know that specifically Berkeley had this rather irritating habit when I went there to reject class credits from community colleges. I was warned about it by the community college but was told that if I fought it then they should end up accepting them. I didn't bother fighting because they accepted enough credits. Sorry for digressing. (Wait, I know how to try and save this paragraph.) I have stated in the past that I felt that the community college I went to did a better overall job at teaching the lower division classes than did Berekley. The classes were smaller at the community college and the instructors were more focused on their lower division classes because that's all they had.

Anyway as you mention there's much more to "their inequalities" as people expect. Accreditation ensures a minimum standard. In my personal experience, this minimum standard was meet for the lower division classes. Berekeley still reserved the right to cherry pick which credits they accepted. The ones that they rejected I believe that if I had fought it I could have got them to accept most of them (perhaps all?). From that perspective there is equality of sorts but let's look at the rest of the picture.

I was earning my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I understand at the time that there were only three colleges that offered Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science, Berkeley, Stanford (those spoiled mama's boy cry babys), and Purdue (IIRC). Berkeley was struggling at the time with defining the major and the content of the courses. I feel that it was a most excellent program that really laid a strong foundation for my career. I believe that this program was the basic model that is now offered at all (most?) the UC campuses now. I would guess that it was also a model for helping other schools define their own programs.

So my point is that the purpose of accreditation is ensuring a minimum standard. This means different things at different levels. We can have equality at specific class levels and still have a range of quality at the level of the different institutions.

 

I agree with these statements. I believe it's time to cook the Brown Teal and move on.

 

Huffman said, "Stanford (those spoiled mama's boy cry babys)"

kf5k replied, "I agree with these statements. I believe it's time to cook the Brown Teal and move on."

Huffman replied, "Did you learn the truth about Stanford by attending Berkeley, also?"

 

I'm not sure that I would call what I wrote a "rating system". Certainly not an objective one. That's because it's far too personal. It's how I tend to break schools down in my own mind, but it depends on my own interests and on my own perceptions. That's why I say over and over and over again that it's educational aesthetics.

The one point where it approaches tangible solidity is the precise place where you choose to attack it: at the level of accreditation.

What don't you understand?

I questioned your assertion that Degreeinfo speaks with one voice, that we hold that all RA schools = wonderful or all non-accredited schools = mills, or that we are sharks that attack anyone that disagrees with us.

I presented my own vision of the academic pecking order, built around accreditation standards. The lower schools fail to reach that standard by varying degrees. The higher schools not only meet the expected standard but have other interesting features as well. That includes a whole lot of things, limited only by one's imagination and personal interests. It might include delivery media, unusual courses or programs, graduate programs, high powered faculty, a selected student body, impressive results of various kinds, leadership in a professional field, or abundant scholarly research product. I created several levels of higher schools depending on how many of these interesting features they could show and on how pervasive these special features seemed to be in the institution.

And I disagreed with your suggestion that the gap between higher and lower accredited schools is analogous the gap between accredited and (most) non-accredited schools. That's because even the weaker RA schools can be assumed to meet the expected RA standard, while we have no way of knowing whether non-accredited schools do or not (and evidence to suggest that the great majority of them don't). I say it again: UC Berkeley accepts community college credit. That's a strong form of equivalence.

That's why I suggested that good non-accredited schools have an additional burden of proof placed on them. If they do not submit to assessment by trusted outside parties, they have to provide sufficient evidence to enable us to assess them by ourselves. If we're expected to form a good impression of them, we have to be given some reason why we should.

Yes, I think that's accurate. But it presumes that we agree on how the word "quality" is being used. That's still unclear.

But we probably characterize that variation rather differently and draw different conclusions from it.

I see all accredited schools being able to teach their subjects to the expected standard. That's why RA schools accept transfer credit from other RA schools.

But some schools add to this basic equivalence by providing unusual coursework and majors. I place particular weight on those that are interesting to me. That's why I like Hsi Lai university. These offerings might not be quite so interesting to the next person... North and Bill Grover (and most of Degreeinfo frankly) don't even inhabit same planet that I do.

Some schools admit a highly selected group of students that they hope will be especially stimulating to one another (the "top tier" schools). Other schools take a different but equally valid route by providing unusual educational services to the wider community. (Most DL schools are here, simply by definition of what DL is.) The California State University's Open University allows members of the general public to take regular courses (assuming prerequisites are met and instructors approve) without even applying for admission to the university. Where else but San Francisco State can you walk in off the street and learn how to read Egyptian heiroglyphs? Berkeley would raise an eyebrow at that, but it is clearly special.

Some schools offer doctoral programs. Some host conferences. Some conduct achaeological excavations or operate "big science" laboratory complexes. Some engage in collaborations. Some publish a lot of research, and occasionally that research is recognized as significant or it even changes things. Schools create new technologies and spin off commercial enterprises. Schools produce prominent alumni and schools win competitive grants, awards and accolades.

But the fact remains, I can study calculus at a community college and then transfer it into Berkeley. It's not like there are two different calculuses: smart Berkeley calculus and stupid calculus for the rest of us. Or maybe it does mean precisely that, except that the higher Berkeley calculus consists of the advanced graduate courses in complex analysis with its Hermitian and Kahler metrics, holomorphic line and vector bundles and Chern classes, stuff that they just don't offer many places, accredited or not.

I can study introductory calculus at both a "top" school and at a "standard" school precisely because the standard school is in fact standard. Both schools submit to accreditation and are recognized as meeting that standard. That's the thing that non-accredited schools lack and why they have additional responsibility placed upon them. I happily accept (and even celebrate, as some of my past posts attest) the fact that some of them can rise to the challenge. But the great majority of them can't.

But I built my views upon the basis of the accreditation standard, not in an attempt to subvert it by suggesting that it's just another small variation dwarfed by the tremendous difference between mundane colleges and prestige ones.

 

As to Stanford I merely accept your greater knowledge, and mainly wanted to get to the Teal. Nothing worse than burnt Teal. Unless it's crying St------ cry babys!!!

 

Hey, at least they got mama's ...UC Berkeley is a bunch of pot smokin slackers with no better place to go ...Stanford uses them for lab rats ...but only in the most caring way.

 

Now, they could go to Hamilton U.-----Beats being a lab rat!!!

 

Well, I have a mama, as for the rest, I see nothing wrong with that.