Masters Propio (ENEB, etc)

Gratias tibi, Greg.

 

From the "infamous" Ecole supérieure Robert de Sorbon® celebrating its "infamous" 17th birthday. Operating not through a "Loophole" but thanks to Title III Book VII of Code of Education of the French Republic.
HAPPY NEW YEAR WITHOUT COVID (Even for you, which shows our Christian behavior ...)

 

Well from the looks of what I saw on degreeforum.com, ENEB was evaluated by WES as an unaccredited Masters degree. This is likely because it was not evaluated as attached to Universidad Isabel I but as its on institution's credential. The good and bad news of this is that ENEB is now considered a recognized institution that is awarding non-accredited degrees equivalent to what we consider in the US as state-approved degrees. Therefore, these degrees will be legal to use here in the states based on the laws of the individual states. They are also still good for resume/CV boosters in using the MBA or Masters title.

When ECE evaluated Universidad Isabel I - Masters Proprio as a Bachelors degree having credits from ENEB, they likely evaluated those courses as alternative learning credits used to add another specialty for the same degree at that level since the degree is Proprio. They were speaking in code about the courses being able to be taken with a three year Bachelors degree.

I would suggest those that are wanting to have the Universdad Isabel I/ENEB degree evaluated as a Masters degree to get a course evaluation done by ACE for alternative credit that would be equivalent to 30 graduate hours and submit the transcript from them to one of the NACES credential evaluators. So far, Masters Proprio degrees that grant ECTS credits do not have any recognition but a few evaluators may recommend them for transfer credit. Having ACE submit a transcript to the evaluator along with your Universdad Isabel diploma and ENEB degree may move some evaluators to grant equivalency to a Masters from a regionally accredited school based on validation (similar to UCN). Most credential evaluators may not budge but some will, namely IERF and SpanTran.

 

I still hope one of these evaluators gives this an equivalent regional accredited Masters degree even though I don't necessary need an ENEB degree but would pursue one with a favorable evaluation.

 

Another way to get this recognized at the graduate level would be to have Universidad Isabel I for a fee transfer ENEB courses into their their program and issue the transcript as officially coming from Universidad Isabel I. I'm reading that they do accept transfer credit from propio coursework. If this is really true then that transcript and diploma would be official and the equivalent recognition would be a Masters degree from a regionally accredited school.

 

Regarding the Ecole Superieure Robert de Sorbon: if you go on their website, you are redirected to a site where, um, performance improvement pills, if you know what I mean, are sold.

Guess they decided to change to a more honest business!!

 

I just have a hunch that any transcript that doesn't come from the parent institution is going to be evaluated that way by WES, perhaps others. But at least ECE didn't evaluate it that way. I have been told of some proprio programs that allow students to get transcripts directly from the parent institution instead of the teaching partnership school. Formacion Alcala has it where your transcripts come from parent schools like San Jorge University. The cost is $75.

I think we still have the luxury of exercising some caution on a conclusion concerning what they are considered to be by consensus. At the moment, we know for sure that:

- One evaluator (ECE) deems them as equivalent to U.S. regionally accredited Bachelors degrees.
- One evaluator (WES) deems them as equivalent to U.S. non-accredited (or unaccredited, same meaning) Masters degrees.

I see positives in both evaluations because both evaluators are recognizing them as legitimate degrees, and to be clear for onlookers who may not be aware, non-accredited does not equal bogus. Unaccredited degrees are still valid (with some exceptions of course). However, in that situation the reputation of the school is of utmost importance maybe more than in other situations since there is no accreditation oversight, although it is important to note that in Spain the parent school is expected to act as the "accreditor" and the teaching school identifies the parent schools as such.

As it stands, ENEB does not have a bad reputation, and to their credit they have garnered a number of industry awards in their country, so even on the unaccredited take I would still be comfortable. For $229-$299, REAL comfortable, lol. You can't lose in that deal.

ECE was definitely speaking in code at best. At worst, they were totally BSing, lol. I mean, a school allowing admission to people with 3-year Bachelors degrees is not a reason to deem a Masters degree as a Bachelors. That makes no sense and is contradictory to the reality that even U.S. regionally accredited schools accept international students with 3-year Bachelors degrees and no one suddenly considers the Masters degrees of those schools to suddenly be Bachelors degrees.

I'm almost certain they won't do it. UII only offers official degrees and AFAIK schools in Spain usually won't allow the transfer of proprio credits into an official program. But if someone were open to trying I'd love to hear the feedback they'd get from the school.

 

ENEB as an institution by itself seems to be equivalent based on reputation to what Nations University was before 2015 when they got accredited, maybe even better. For the price, there still is nothing to lose with their programs as they still have some power and validity behind them!

 

I had a conversation with Sara at UI1. The way she explained things, they will not accept any credits from a titulo propio program into their Master's programs because:

1. They generally don't like to accept credits into their Master's programs

2. Even if they were to accept credits from a titulo propio program (and they do), it would have to be for a Bachelor's program due to the previously mentioned Master's program restriction/position, and even then they would only allow transfer credit for 15% of the Bachelor's program because the Bachelor's is 240 ECTS and the Master's from ENEB is 60 (which is common, but there are of course Master's programs that are 90 and 120 and so on). So regardless of the level difference they will always only go by the ECTS totals.

I ran through a number of circumstances and scenarios, but everything was declined. They will only accredit ENEB (and we know in this arrangement it has a different meaning than what it means in the U.S.), certify the program and degrees, issue degrees, and provide verification, but nothing more. I mean, that's plenty, but...

Since they already verify ENEB degrees through their verification system (I mentioned that to Sara), I asked if there is any chance in the future they might just go a step further and list the courses and grades so it could be used as an electronic transcript? Sara's answer: de ninguna manera José, translated as "no way, José."

Okay, she didn't say "no way, José" but the answer was 'no' and still the same.

 

So this would indicate that University Isabel I de Castilla / UII would not accept any transfer of post-graduate credits from ANY outfit. Wow.

Not sure if this is a Spain-wide approach or just UII, but it would be unfortunate, as universities in many other nations (including the UK, Australia and Hong Kong) accept anywhere from 25% to 50% of post-graduate study in transfer credits from other institutions. Eastern European universities can sometimes be more restrictive than this, but even then they usually allow the transfer of elective credits (e.g.. if your masters programme has 8 core, 4 foundational, and 4 elective courses, you would be allowed to transfer in only credits that would count for the 4 elective courses).

I am surprised that such a new university (which are typically more liberal than traditional/historical universities) would be so restrictive as to not allow the transfer of any credits into their degrees.

Since we're talking about Business degrees (and not specialised degrees) which are fairly generic in scope, this is all more the more unusual.

 

From what Sara said, they will take them for the bachelor's programs but that's it, but what she meant overall was that there is no chance for titulo propio credits to be accepted into an official master's program. She said "Own titles, because they are not our own titles, for master's programs we cannot take them." For official master's credits transferring to an official master's program, it's not something they like to do but it can be determined during an evaluation, so it's at least possible. The one thing she stressed a lot was that the programs need to match too, and that was for both a bachelor's and a master's. That makes sense, but I bet even there they will be stringent.

I believe WGU won't take any credits into their master's programs, so there is at least one U.S. example of some difficulty in that regard.

 

University Isabel I is quite the outlier here. Did a quick search, and the vast majority of Spanish universities offering post-graduate qualifications will allow up to 15% in academic transfer credit, or 18% in credit for work experience. They are all quite clear, as well, that credit for Bachelor programmes cannot be used for Master degree programmes, and vice versa.

I think the sticking point is here (emphasis mine):

Or, in short (in English): we don't recognise academic study not done at a university.

This is taken directly from UII's website, should you wish to see for yourself: https://www.ui1.es/acceso-y-matricula/reconocimiento-creditos

ENEB is not a university, and so credits can't be transferred from ENEB to a university. You'd actually have better luck trying to transfer your work experience, than you would trying to make this ENEB bit of paper have use.
Bonus, too, is that at work, not only do you get work experience, they give YOU money. This ENEB farce means you give THEM your money for . . . well, part of the corpse of a tree. Waste if a tree, if you ask me.

Amazingly the university giving credibility to this ENEB 'degree' (which, if you read earlier posts in this thread, was how this ridiculous endeavour was justified in the first place) won't even accept it for transfer credits. Lol.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing how, now that this pathway has been eliminated, we once again move the goalposts.

 

Except that UII will accept transfers - just not from random business schools with no accreditation.

I'm glad you did the research on this one, although I don't know if it's a great reflection on University Isabel I that they're happy to enter into business arrangements for courses they won't even back pedagogically.

Perhaps it is in their favour that they're not willing to degrade their own academic standards - but there's something unseemly about a university lending their university status/label to something that even they KNOW is not legit.

On a totally unrelated note, the cost for this ENEB 'degree' (which was apparently so cheap as to not be worth worrying about), not counting the additional cost in getting the degree on paper (which is, insanely, 100% the cost of the 'degree' itself), OR the cost of international evaluation (another 200USD), is roughly equal to what 1 billion of our fellow humans live on in an entire year.

One can only assume that the eagerness shown to purchase this ENEB degree and disregard all questions and hesitation, is also shown when UNICEF comes knocking asking for a $50 donation.

 

Their policy on not accepting titulo propio credits into an official master's program is not a matter strictly with ENEB, it's simply the way they deal with titulo propio credits regardless of where they come from and that's customary in Spain. I actually quoted the page you linked to Sara during the conversation because I wanted to know if their mention of acceptance of titulo propio credits applied to master's programs there, and she told me that page is really meant to be more in reference to their bachelor's degree programs. She said:

"The Credit Recognition studies ("transfer credit evaluations" in American terms) are done before you enroll into our official bachelor's degrees..."

Just so everyone is clear, I wanted to post that information because the idea was raised about transferring ENEB degree credits to UI1. It was known by some last year that this couldn't be done with their master's programs as I do recall some discussions here and other places so the information is not really new, but I figured bringing in a summary of a real conversation with a staff member would drive the point home for those in doubt, and inform some who weren't already aware.

In my opinion, it wouldn't have made a ton of sense to finish a master's at ENEB and then try to move into another master's at UI1 anyway unless they had a program that was really hard to find or get into somewhere else. Sure, the pricing would be cheaper in that case as it normally is outside the United States, but still, it wouldn't interest me much personally.

 

He's just here to spew inflammatory posts at ENEB as he has in the past. Why? I don't know, lol.

I figured the ECE recognition of the degree being equivalent to a U.S. regionally accredited degree would've been enough to stop it, but nope. And since he'll come back with this: yes, we know it was evaluated as a bachelor's degree. We also know the reasoning ECE gave for it was nonsense. Nevertheless, the degree was evaluated as legitimate and an RA equivalent by a respected NACES evaluator and that's that. Why not just accept it? LOL!

 

I have never understood the pursuit of a credential that has 17 pages on a forum regarding its evaluation. If it takes this much work to figure out how to market the program for your own resume/purpose, what is the point? Pursue a degree in the country in which you live in order to avoid any evaluation equivalency issues.