I suppose this gives LBU and some of its graduates a warm fuzzy feeling. My concern with this sort of thing is that it may mislead students and potential students into believing that LBU is accredited in the way higher education accreditation is normally understood. The issue of ASIC not having degree granting authority they get around by pointing out that they have degree granting authority from the State of Louisiana (believe it is an exemption). A degree from LBU would not be understood to be accredited in the UK or the USA (etc) in the way we understand higher education accreditation. Perhaps ASIC has meaningful standards but if one looks at the majority of the schools with accreditation or premier status (they were mostly unaccredited schools as I recall). https://lbu.edu/about-lbu/#accreditation https://lbu.edu/about-lbu/#accreditation
Accreditors never have degree granting authority. Schools do. That "perhaps" is the crux. IIRC, they used to accredit unwonderfuls. Do they still?
I am wondering why they don't get TRACS; at least, it is popular for Christian universities in the United States.
I believe degree granting authority comes from the government in the form of State approval to issue degrees. Of course in the UK and Canada this is somewhat complicated by the way they do the equivalent of accreditation. In the US accreditation is the value added to that degree granting authority that (for lack of a better word) gives the degree credibility based on assessment. As to the unwonderfuls I would say you are correct. I was trying to be polite but when I scanned the schools they appeared to be substandard schools that probably couldn't have gotten actual accreditation. I agree with Tekman that long ago LBU should have managed to get actual real accreditation. They had a problem in terms of faculty and perhaps quality long ago and have sought to rectify that in the last few years at least (as far as qualitative issues). They own their small campus and I believe were debt-free.
ASIC isn't "real accreditation"? Admittedly, I don't know much about it aside from it being in the UK and a recognized UK accreditor. What criteria are you using?
While I do agree with you I would love to be proven wrong. I would love to see that ASIC does mean equivalent of our understanding of accreditation. It would open up an affordable option for some institutions.
Why? ASIC doesn't strive for that. They perform some sort of quality control, but they have nothing to do with degrees (except incidentally since some of their accredited schools award degrees). I'm sure they know that some of their members abuse this distinction. I wonder why they don't speak to that?
I still suspect that over time they've come to see themselves filling a role as an accreditor for boutique institutions in international distance ed, even though that exceeds their scope.
The optimist in me likes to think that ASIC had good intentions initially. ASIC didn't, at least back then, misleadingly market themselves. The issue was that "accreditation" meant something different in their target market (UK) than it did in the US. Kind of like how there are certain industry standards or professional associations that "accredit" programs, companies, staff etc. You see it with some hospitals. ABC Association will "Accredit" their nurses. It doesn't mean that they are trying to mislead you. It's just a different usage of the same word. ASIC accreditation offers all the utility of the people of this board collectively choosing to accredit LBU. Sure, they can say they are accredited. But in the U.S. this is typically understood to be by an accreditor recognized by USDOE and/or CHEA as a U.S. institutional or programmatic accreditor. It just isn't that. Does DEAC still have that QA program in place? The one that was meant to show that the school met some standards but wasn't accreditation? That would seem a more honest approach.
For whatever reason, LBU has removed the ASIC information under the Accreditation tab. It had clearly noted their accreditation by ASIC and now it is gone. And they just got it. Now it says they are not accredited. https://lbu.edu/about-lbu/#accreditation