Ft. Lauderdale report may have MIGS interest

So I was talking to a reporter from Ft. Lauderdale today, who has just become aware of the bad and fake degree world, and was doing research on 8 or 9 prominent folks in his area with very questionable degrees.

It has now occurred to me that I should have told him (and I shall) about the MIGS phenomenon, run from his vicinity. There may still be a story to be told about what went on (or conceivably is going on -- did anyone actually enroll?) right there in his back yard, as it were.

This topic surely doesn't deserve a forum of its own any more (can no one make it go away?) but it may not be entirely dead yet.

 

Ten years and it remains open. :shock:

 

From my conversations with them, I don't think they enrolled anyone or, if so, just a few here and there. Danzig was busy trying to figure out ways to make money on it, Arias was trying to get a side business going, and a sincere dean was trying to create a real school out of nothing.

 

It was offline for many years. The moderation team suggested making it publicly available again, and I saw no reason not to... so here it is.

 

So MIGS never awarded any degrees?

 

They operated for months, not years. No, I don't know of any degrees awarded.

 

Thank you, Rich. I've read of MIGS on this forum, but never knew if they actually awarded any degrees.

 

That was always the big question that everyone kept asking, and to which no one at MIGS would provide a straight answer: Would the degree ultimately awared be one with the CEU's name on it, issued by the CEU in Mexico, a legitimate school in Monterrey, or would it be a degree from MIGS, which was a Sheila enterprise that really never even existed at all except in a tiny office, shared with Sheila's other less-than-wonderful enterprises, and had no credibility and certainly no legitimate accreditation. A diploma with MIGS' name at the top would have been a joke. A diploma with the CEU's name at the top... reasonably credible. But no one could give a definitive answer, and Arias (the president), when John and I met with him, was incredibly evasive on this question, most likely because he didn't know, but possibly because he was told not to go into detail.

 

I don't think he (Arias) knew. It was really hard to figure out, as Chip notes.

It wasn't just Danzig, though. She had hired an academic to run the thing (not Arias), had Arias as the potential face of MIGS as its "president", and they had recruited real faculty members.

In the 10-plus years since MIGS, I've come to the conclusion that it was a failed attempt to run an Empresarial-type deal. The CEU would receive a cut of the earnings and, in return, allow MIGS to use its degree-granting authority. I think the diplomas would have said "CEU." But it is less clear, just as with Empresarial, if the degrees would have actually been issued by the home school. (I think not.) In other words, you might have seen a CEU official's name on the diploma, but the processes, record-keeping, transcripts, etc., would have been all MIGS.

I think their biggest failure in all of this was to establish a separate identity ("MIGS") alongside CEU. Empresarial didn't do that; the U.S. operation used the same name as the Costa Rican university. If MIGS has simply used "CEU" from the beginning, they might have been able to fly under the radar and do some business. That wouldn't have changed the fundamental issues around whether or not the operation was truly the "CEU"--again, as in Empresarial. But they might have been able to pull it off. Instead, using the "MIGS" moniker made more obvious the U.S.-based nature of the operation and its real separation from the CEU. People started thinking about MIGS as a stand-alone operation--which it was--and deemed it woefully inadequate, putting marketing way ahead of building a legitimate operation--which was true. But hindsight is a wonderful thing. In real time, it took some time and several events to peel back enough layers of this onion to see what it really was: a Danzig cash-grab.

A more successful example of this was Touro University International (now Trident). The difference was that TUI was able to build quickly a legitimate operation--legitimate enough to get its own regional accreditation once it was split off from Touro College. Same concept, waaaayyy different execution and outcomes.