Kennedy-Western University

NO way. You can't say that about K-WU. It wasn't the first of its kind in anything. DL? No. DL doctorates? No. Non-resident doctorates? No. California Authorization? No. Denied California Approval? Nope. Kicked out of California? Naw.

Now, K-WU was a major player in government employees getting busted for using official funds to get degrees from an unaccredited school. I'm not sure if they were the first.

K-WU was never first at anything good. Actually, they were never good.

No, it didn't. California was riddled with unaccredited DL law schools by the end of the 1970's before K-WU came into existence.

I can. They got kicked out of several states, then failed in an attempt at accreditation before the owners shut them down. Very nice. But at no time did they offer anything that resembled a real education, even back then.

IIRC, KW-U was never in Colorado. It was not in existence in 1981, either. I'm having trouble believing your assertions here....

What "other institutions"? Universities won't care because the school was never accredited. I guess some employers might not look too carefully. Have you considered lifting a few rocks and seeing under which one Preston University lies? I think they took over K-WU's (later, Warren National University) records.

As CalDog mentions, find Preston. Good luck finding the right one, though.

 

Different states have different laws and regulations regarding colleges and universities. Some states have stricter rules, which may impose a larger regulatory burden and more responsibilities on schools. Other states have looser rules, which may allow schools to operate with little oversight.

Not surprisingly, unaccredited schools generally operate in states with loose rules (after all, the states with strict rules may not even let them in). Wyoming, for example, had loose rules at the time that KWU/WNU operated there. It's possible that Wyoming had no legal requirement for anyone to take over student records in the event of school closure, and if this is the case, there may not be anyone who has taken over the registrar duties.

Accreditation agencies may have rules about the continued maintenance of student records, even when states do not. But KWU/WNU was unaccredited.

 

As I mentioned earlier, you can print the transcript your self, it will have the same value.

 

You could probably write the transcript yourself and it will likely have the same value.

Perhaps KWU was close to one of kind from the point of view that it was a diploma mill that tried harder than almost all other diploma mills in trying to put up a facade of being legitimate even for the consumption of their students. For example, no matter what you put down for life experience they typically ended up telling "candidates" they they needed five KWU/WNU classes to complete their degree. Okay, we had heard some claim four and some claim six, one even claimed seven but I was not sure of the veracity of that claim.

 

FWIW - There is a KW LinkedIn Group and Facebook Group

Announcement from Kennedy Western University Alumni | LinkedIn

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kennedy-Western-UniversityWarren-National-University-Alumni/117171474969710

While I don't believe a KW transcript has any value...

Shawn

 

Accreditor Report

I assume the answer is no, but does the accreditors report/review on WNU ever become public? Would be an interesting read.

 

Schools are free to release their accreditation evaluations to the public, but they don't usually do this, even if the evaluation was successful. If the evaluation was unsuccessful, then the likelihood is probably even lower.

 

Kennedy Western University has been instrumental in achieving my career goals. I was a director level manager of a fortune 500 company. I had reached a level in my career that a BSBA was required to position myself for the next executive level.
To accomplish this goal an HR representative recommended KWU with the full financial support of the corporation. It was explained to me that Kennedy Western University was a mid-career institution supporting corporate managers meet their professional goals with accreditations.
The course work was extensive and test proctored. My final exam was a 100 page theses. The theses was returned to me and was read by the professor, marked throughout the paper identifying mistakes with recommendations.
In 2003 I received my degree. I continued to work my way up to an executive level position of a fortune 100 company for the past 6 years.
I believe KWU was one of the pioneering online institutions. The professors were contracted from much larger fully accredited colleges and universities. My professors were excellent replying to question and supporting the learning process.
It was not an issue of quality education rather it is mater of well-heeled institutions protecting & maintaining their competitive enrollment advantage at the time. Today most Colleges, Universities and Private Universities offer online programs as a norm.
Kennedy Western University is not a degree mill it was simply an institution ahead of its time, I believe if they would have had more financial backing they would have received full accreditation. For those reading this post, I recommend looking into what it takes to become accredited a real eye opener you will be suppressed.
Recently, I decided to pursue an MBA for personal satisfaction and learned of all the bad PR KWU had received and other institution not accepting KWU transcripts for further education.

With Respects,
Qualified but not accredited

 

Wow, good old K-W is still inspiring debate.

I have been of two minds about the school. Clearly it didn't give degrees away. Some work was required. Also, the school claimed to have qualified faculty moonlighting from accredited B&M schools. Finally, there was that long list of employers who would recognize, and apparently pay for, K-W degree programs.

But.

The school's failure to achieve even DETC accreditation is very troubling. Given its sheer size, the problem shouldn't have been mere money. There are many regionally accredited schools that live on comparative shoestrings. And there's the fact that many students entered the school and completed their studies without ever having been told that the school lacked accreditation. Take it from me, when I considered doing a K-W doctorate some years ago, their materials were slick and professional. You'd never guess anything was...unusual...about the school's accreditation status.

This forum kept me from making that mistake, by the way, for which I am still very grateful.

 

This means nothing. If true, it simply indicates one employer's decision to pay for a K-W degree.

The term "mid-career institution" is an awkward one. I have trouble believing anyone would actually say that. But no matter.

No, it wasn't. That has been well established.

What's the significance of this? That they had a real person look at your work? Faint praise.

Not surprising. The opportunity to use spurious credentials in the workplace is the reason diploma mills exist. That was true before K-WU and continues to this day. But, using the metaphor created by John Bear, it is a time bomb ticking in your resume. You never know when or where it will explode.

Your beliefs are misplaced. K-WU was a copy-cat operation, created by people with experience at other unaccredited operations. It was, however, a pretty big imitation, enrolling thousands.

Yes, many people with legitimate credentials earned money at K-WU. Yes, they actually provided some instruction. But this is damning the thing with very faint praise.

This is a common rationalization, but it is not true. There are thousands of degree-granting institutions in the U.S. They did not conspire against your little diploma mill.

While much more common these days, it was common enough in the days preceding K-WU, and there were many contemporary institutions awarding degrees by distance learning that were (a) accredited and (b) legitimate. K-WU was neither.

While determining was is a degree mill and what is a legitimate, unaccredited school is not an exact science, the facts point clearly to the former. We have reams of information collected over years of its operation to support that.

Wow. That operation really raked in the bucks. They're gone because they ran out of states willing to tolerate them and they didn't move it all overseas. Money wasn't the issue.

What is being suppressed here is the truth, which happens in cases of denial.

The lack of acceptance of your degree has nothing to do with "bad PR." (Though there is a plethora of bad things said--deservedly so--about this operation.) It has to do with the fact that the school was never accredited. You really should take note of the fact that, irrespective of your claims regarding the operation's legitimacy, it is indistinguishable from a diploma mill. It doesn't matter if you're right--and you most certainly are not. There is no difference.

Neither. Not with a K-WU degree. Sorry.

 

Wow! This is an old thread!

 

I simply meant that whatever difference there was between K-WU and a diploma mill, it doesn't matter. It is a distinction without a difference. In both cases, holders of these credentials end up with the same thing: an empty diploma with no school--past or present--behind it. The main difference is that K-WU grads had to do some work for their fake degrees. Sounds worse, not better.

 

Yes I agree with SteveFoerster. Just a single additional mention without any real value.
This "distinction" provides a kind of "higher" level at the end. But there is nothing.

Best,
Mickael

 

K-W was the siren of unaccredited schools. Man, I wanted to believe in them. But under all the carefully engineered veneer of legitimacy was the brutal fact that the school was unaccredited and unable to achieve accreditation.

I reached a point where I was choosing between their BSEE and a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice.

Both equally valueless I'm afraid. But the Ph.D. diploma was sure impressive!

 

An interesting question to my mind is whether or not the owner of KWU recognized that he owned a diploma mill. The answer perhaps being another one of those distinctions without a difference things but I find the query intriguing at least.

The one thing that is clear about KWU is that KWU victims (aka graduates) were the most vocal and active diploma mill defenders on this forum and on Wikipedia.

 

This is a fascinating question. I am late to the game as I didn't start paying attention until KW was a memory, but from everything I have read I would say no, and then the markets evolved around him and the label was applied, and there was no way out.

 

Ed,

If you saw the now-deleted post, I apologize. We don't want to discourage people from posting their thoughts, particularly when they are based on opinion.

There is a lot of backstory to the K-W issue, and a lot of shady dealings of various sorts (including having nearly all operations in California, while claiming to be in Wyoming) that certainly don't paint a picture of someone who genuinely thought he was doing something legitimate. But without having all of the backstory, I could see why it might look that way. I don't remember all of the details offhand, but if you're really interested in looking into it, there's a lot in our archives, and lots more at the old alt.education.distance archives at groups.google.com.