National Accreditation Gets Slammed

Discussion in 'Accreditation Discussions (RA, DETC, state approva' started by Rich Douglas, Nov 13, 2008.

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  1. me again

    me again Well-Known Member

    Under your premise, a DETC school could never achieve university status to award PhD degrees. Pray tell, how did the 100% online RA universities achieve this same status to award PhD degrees?
     
  2. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    That's not unlike the California State University, which is forbidden by law from awarding doctoral degrees (except joint-degree programs and Ed.D.s.) Nevertheless, some of the CSUs manage to be interesting places.

    My old SFSU has what could be one of the more
    exciting astrophysics masters programs on the planet. There are active research groups in things like quantum optics as well. The mathematics faculty all have research interests. In April mathematics will be hosting the 2009 Spring Western Section Meeting of the American Mathematical Society and then in Summer 2010 the 22nd Annual International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics. There's even the creepy creep project. (It studies me!)

    Performing arts alums include half a dozen academy award winners, the creators of 'Cheers' and "Frazer', even vampire novelist Anne Rice and the Vatican organist. Last year my old philosophy department hosted the 81st annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association's Pacific Division, a big event at the downtown Weston St. Francis hotel. SFSU has its own CIA. There are Italian incunables and Egyptian mummies.

    I was primarily talking about pushing faculty into being something a bit more stimulating than just hack lecturers. When faculty are doing interesting things and when they get their students involved in what they are doing, then students often do end up with their names on publications.

    If DETC graduate students don't care about the intellectual life of their disciplines (but still want their graduate degrees), then isn't that justification right there for the RA world not taking DETC seriously?

    Even modest little fourth-tier Cal State Dominguez Hills' business school hosts a Center for Corporate Governance and Business Ethics. It's got a call-for-papers out for an online symposium on runaway executive compensation, a very timely topic at the moment. The fact that it's an online sympsium will make the event accessible to CSUDH's many DL MBA students. CSUDH isn't even thinking about offering a DBA or any kind of business doctorate and it's the least prestigious of all of the 23 CSUs.

    The thing is, all of the examples that I've provided in this thread are from programs that don't even award doctorates. They aren't doing anything that DETC can't do too. It doesn't cost a whole lot either. As long as DETC thrashes madly, crying 'We can't do it! It's unrealistic! It isn't fair! But you have to believe that our programs are just as good or else we'll sue you! We'll pass legislation! We want to teech!!"... DETC isn't going to be as convincing to the rest of the academic world as it might have been.
     
  3. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I'm sorry if my post wasn't clear enough on that topic. The pilot projects would result in awarded PhD degrees. With adequate transparency they would be able to demonstrate to the satisfaction of all their ability to produce high quality research. At that point the small pilot projects would be allowed to grow. Over a period of, let's say, a decade such a program could be closely monitored to insure high quality at which point the PhD programs would be full-fledged. You don't think this is necessary? Perhaps not but it's clear that neither my opinion nor yours counts in this matter. I simply proposed a plan that would work in the real world.
     
  4. John Bear

    John Bear Senior Member

    bioweb wrote that RA and NA are "virtually identical in philosophy and scope of action."

    Well, yes to the first, but not sure about the second. A typical RA site visit involves 6 or 7 specialists visiting the school for w3 to 5 days. A typical DETC site visit involves 4 or 5 specialists visiting the school for 7 or 8 hours.

    I wonder if DETC visits when a doctoral program is involved are longer?
     
  5. Abner

    Abner Well-Known Member

    Here are the latest DETC site visit parameters. I received this info. from DETC today:

    The size of the committee-- and the length of the visit-- are directly related to the number of students enrolled and the number of programs and courses offered.

    DETC visits are very similar to RA visits, except in our case, there are no students on a campus to visit. Student input is done via our mail survey, and often our telephone surveys, of students at a distance.

    Large institutions, with 200,000 active students, have had committees of 18 members for 3 days...the US Air Force extension school is one example.

    I have been on accrediting examinations that lasted 4 days. This happened at places like the University of South Africa.

    The minimum sized onsite team is 4 people for one day.

    Tiny institutions, with one program, 4 staff and 250 students, would take one and a half days and involve 4 onsite visitors.

    In addition to the on site team, we also make use of subject specialists off site--usually professors from RA colleges who review courseware at home, and file extensive, 30 page reports. These reports are provided to the onsite team in advance of the visit.

    Again, a small institution-- with one program-- would have at least 2 offsite subject specialist reviewers and a large institution could have as many as 30 or more.

    Here is the average examination team for a middle-sized institution with 5,000 students and 6 degree programs ( two areas: business and nursing) would have:

    Chair
    Business Examiner
    Education Standards
    DETC Staff Observer
    State Observer
    And one onsite Subject Specialist for each different degree area--2 in this case (nursing and business)
    Offsite evaluators: at least two more for each area. Thus, four sets of eyes look at the curricula in the two programs.

    Total: 9 people
    Average time onsite: 3 nights and 2 full days.


    Sounds pretty stringent.


    Abner
     
  6. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Another obvious difference is that the regional accreditors have a pre-accreditation status. While they do very occasionally waive it for especially robust applicants, they typically will require applicant schools to spend several years as candidates. (Even UC Merced has to do its time as a WASC candidate.)

    The kind of schools that are accredited might tell us something too. DETC schools are typicaly small proprietorships, operating out of modest premises with relatively small staff. RA schools are typically much larger state-run or non-profit institutions with far more resources. So given DETC schools' smaller scale, I'm guessing that DETC is willing to settle for significantly smaller and more streamlined administrations and for fewer financial and tangible assets than the regionals would generally expect to see.

    I'm not sure how much impact that necessarily has on what students actually encounter, the academic quality of a particular class or program. I'm confident that some DETC programs are probably stronger than some RA programs. (At least RA DL programs at the low-end.) A geat deal of that depends on what individual faculty are doing.

    But... I also expect that higher RA expectations, however anal they may seem in particular cases (document this, create a procedure for that) might well result in stronger programs on average, and in administrations capable of maintaining stronger internal controls.
     
  7. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I have had the impression (please correct me if I'm wrong) that DETC has been disallowed from accrediting doctoral level or research oriented doctoral degrees. Only recently have they been allowed to accredit professional doctorates. (As a side note I'd like to say that I'm a bit surprised at how few schools have elected to take advantage of this opportunity) . So, if I'm correct in what I've said so far then this is not really a question of, "Is DETC accreditation good enough to handle PhD degree programs." It's more a case of, "Is CHEA/whoever sufficiently confident of DETCs ability to accredited schools offering PhD programs." As with all things that involve humans, there is certainly politics involved. There is money involved. There are overt agendas and covert agendas. Personalities come into play and so issues related to power/control come into play. It's just a normal, everyday American soap opera.
     
  8. Kaboom

    Kaboom New Member

    The DBA, Ed.D and DA are all research doctorates, and are approved by the DETC, so why not the Ph.D. I don't get it.
     
  9. Ted Heiks

    Ted Heiks Moderator and Distinguished Senior Member

    The DBA is a professional doctorate with an applied dissertation. The EdD was at least originally supposed to have been a professional doctorate with an applied dissertation (and it is, at some universities, while at other universities, it is indistinguishable from the PhD in Education, which is the research doctorate). The DA is a teaching doctorate.
     
  10. John Bear

    John Bear Senior Member

    me again: "...Pray tell, how did the 100% online RA universities achieve this same status to award PhD degrees?"

    John: That's something I ask myself with some regularity. The last time I checked (but that was a few years ago), there were only two RA schools with 100% nonresident doctorates, Northcentral and what was then Touro.

    Have there been others since then?

    For whatever its worth, on the day Touro got its accreditation for the Ph.D., I telephoned the woman in charge at the Middle States Association, Dr. Robin Dasher-Allston, to congratulate them on this major breakthrough development. She replied that, no, this was not any special deal, since there were already a lot of RA schools with 100% nonresident doctorates. I said that I was not aware of any, and asked for names. She replied, "Well, there's Walden, and Capella, and Nova Southeastern, and Union, for instance." When I politely pointed out that she was wrong, she grew irritated, and had nothing more to say.

    Sometimes I wonder if, had Middle States appreciated what an unusual thing they were doing, anything would have been different?
     
  11. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Doctoral level doctoral degrees? DETC indicates that they are willing to consider the following professional doctorate degree titles:

    Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)
    Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)
    Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT)
    Doctor of Occupational Therapy (DOT)
    Doctor of Arts (specified fields) (DA)
    Doctor of Science (specified fields) (DSc)
    Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.)
    Doctor of Public Administration (DPA)

    http://www.detc.org/theaccrediting.html

    As Kaboom says, DBAs, Ed.D.s and DAs do require dissertations or applied projects that ideally contribute something to their discipline.

    The Doctor of Science (DSc) fits that description. Washington University's Electrical Engineering department certainly emphasizes the research aspect in their DSc program. They require at least one full-time, on-campus research year and host a number of university research activities.

    (WUSTL promotes far-less-ambitious undergraduate research projects too. I'm a guy who loves watching shows like 'Mythbusters' and 'Prototype This' on Discovery Channel. If more high-school kids watched those shows, maybe engineering would start to be cool.)

    In California that's certainly true. The state master-plan for higher education (which is written into law) expressly forbids the California State University from awarding any kind of doctorate except through joint doctoral programs. (That was recently amended to allow Ed.Ds.) The University of California retains a tremendous horde of attorneys, lobbyists and friendly legislators in order to beat down any proletarian eruptions and defend its prestigious turf.

    That means that California, with a population approaching 40 million (bigger than all of Canada) only operates 10 state research universities. (One of those is still under construction and another is a bio-medical specialty campus.) It's not completely stupid though, since concentrating research funding (which can be hundreds of millions of dollars per school per year, from the NIH alone) into eight general campuses allows tremendous resources to be funneled into each one, pushing them up to the top of the rankings, bringing in even more research grants, which in turn... it snowballs. So UC jealously guards its territory to prevent that concentrated largesse and prestige from being dissipated.

    Getting back to DETC, my guess is that DETC probably would like its schools to be able to award every sort of doctorate. But they probably met some resistance from those who feared that unknown schools churning out large numbers of part-time DL doctorates would just cheapen the currency. The existing no-PhD policy looks like a political compromise to me, where each side got some but not all of what they wanted.

    The thing is, there's some continuing concern that DETC is still being perceived as inferior to RA somehow. That's what this thread is about. The response seems to be dark hints of litigation and legislation. My reply is that neither of those is likely to change the perception very much. As long as DETC schools are perceived as small proprietorships (occasionally with iffy histories) that award large numbers of part-time vocational graduate degrees but don't seem to produce any scholarship or have any kind of visible intellectual life, the response will continue to be "DETC? Yeah, right". The fact that it's distance-learning, where everything's "virtual" and "cyber" and there's nothing very tangible to point at (like a campus or a lab), only makes things that much worse.

    That's why it's important that DETC schools act more like conventional universities, and why its important that they do it visibly.

    My argument is that DETC's leadership would be smart if they pushed a few of their reluctant members into playing the game. Hire faculty with research interests and help them apply for grants. Get DL graduate students involved in what they are doing. Publish work with DETC institional affiliations on it. Enter into collaborations with better known RA schools. Publicize what's being accomplished.

    The obvious candidates for this kind of prodding are the institutions what want to be fully accepted as graduate schools, particularly those with doctoral programs or future doctoral ambitions. But it's important to remember that doctoral programs aren't a precondition to behaving more like a conventional university.
     
  12. Abner

    Abner Well-Known Member



    Abner:


    You have misconstrued my words. The litigation has to do with left over issues regarding THECB mess. When you enforce certain policies that are erroneous, they cause certain people to be harmed. This has nothing to do with DETC trying to legislate their way up to the food chain, as you are fond of saying.

    As far as political power. Every sector of society lobbies for their interests. RA does, and NA needs to do it more. Everyone one is a politician sooner or later my friend. We all want to advance our interests.

    Abner
     
  13. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I'm guessing that it's not really a question of cheapening the currency. I'm guessing that at any given time there is a finite number of people interested in earning a doctoral degree. If more of them begin to go to the new online University of XYZ then that means that less of them will go to the old B&M University of ABC. It could simply be a matter of market share. Couldn't it?

    As for the perception that DETC is inferior to RA I'm sure you're right. That's why I made that earlier post about how the DETC schools could set up a pilot project to demonstrate that DETC doctorates were on a par with RA doctorates.
     
  14. Abner

    Abner Well-Known Member

    You bring up some good points Kizmet. I think your idea of a pilot project has merit. Now, onto the question of perception. I think of it like this. For years, most Universities/schools have associated transfer credit with the six regionals. This has been ingrained into their craniums, and that mode of thinking is then passed down to new employees. So what do they do? They automatically look for a regional accreditor that easily fits into their admissions pattern. Next! So what happens? I think logic would dictate that a reasonable and prudent person would assume that since NA's are not accepted in transfer, the schools accredited by them must be inferior. My feeling is that over the last several years (maybe longer) more and more schools are accepting NA credit. Registrars are starting to become a little more familiar with the fact that RA's and NA's are both recognized by the DOE and CHEA. I have also noted more well known respected schools are buying into this frame of thought. As time goes on and familiarity is increased in regards to NA as bona fide accreditors, perception changes. A perception change is a gradual thing. It does not happen over night. I believe things will dramatically change over the next five years. I have said this over and over again, and will not stop saying it.

    As far as the suggestions of others. Can any accreditor afford to improve? Yes. This is just common sense.


    Abner
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Dec 6, 2008
  15. Anthony Pina

    Anthony Pina Active Member

    It think that it is quite plausible that both the Cal State system and the DETC will eventually grant Ph.Ds, since the distinction between the "research doctorate" Ph.D. and the "professional doctorates" are so blurry in many instances. The are plenty of D.B.A. programs that are as research oriented as business Ph.D. programs. With few exceptions, Ed.D. programs are virtually identical to Ph.D. programs in education. The idea of "applied" versus "research" degrees are more the exception than the rule here.

    The Ed.D. is a perfect example. It is a pretty silly degree, since it was envisioned at Harvard to be a first professional degree like an M.D. or J.D., administered by colleges of education, rather than the graduate college. But the education colleges wimped out and made the requirements for the Ed.D. indistinguishable from the Ph.D. in education. Folks at the University of California system (some of which award the Ed.D.) knew this and fought tooth and nail against the right of the CSU to offer the degree (they won for many years).

    Because of the perception of the Ed.D. as a professional degree that doesn't compete directly with the Ph.D. (after all, it's just an applied degree for school principals and superintendents, isn't it?), many schools get their first doctorate approved (usually an Ed.D. in educational administration). From there, they can get further research-based Ed.D.s in educational psychology, instructional technology, counseling, measurement and evaluation or a number of other fields, where the course work and dissertation requirements are the same asfor a Ph.D. in those disciplines. In a few years, those Ed.D. programs can be converted to Ph.D. programs with no modification (two of my alma maters, BYU and Arizona State, easily converted their Ed.D.s into Ph.D.s)

    The comment has been made earlier that scholarly work, such as publication, will do much to enhance the reputation of DETC accredited institutions. This is true, both for the institution and the degrees that it offers. The faculty and their graduates need to buildup their scholarly reputations.I am seeing a number of folks from Capella publishing in the peer reviewed journals and presenting at the professional conferences. This is having a positive impact on Capella's academic reputation.

    The DETC began by accrediting correspondence trade programs. It has evolved (as has distance learning in general) and it exposing some of the weaknesses in our current system (such as why the Ed.D. is and is not a professional degree). I will be looking forward to the fireworks that occur as the proposals for Cal State and DETC Ph.D.s are put forward.
     
  16. Abner

    Abner Well-Known Member

    Interesting angles.


    Abner
     
  17. boydston

    boydston New Member

    It's helpful to remember that DETC (and the other common NA agencies under discussion) do not accredit degrees or programs. They accredit schools and institutions. So, you're not really getting an accredited DA but a DA from an accredited school. An accredited school cannot offer a degree or program that does not meet the standards of the accreditor.
     
  18. boydston

    boydston New Member

    The other thing which is happening is that the NA accreditors, under federal pressure, are raising their own standards. This is good -- except that some of the regional accreditors are becoming less rigid. So we've got a situation such as what happened in TRACS where some of the flagship schools said, "Wow, if we have to do this much work for TRACS accreditation, it's not that much harder to do the regional thing." And that's what they've done. Then after a few years they figure they don't really need the NA anymore. e.g. Liberty has bailed on TRACS.

    The same thing will happen with DETC. As they raise their standards and as it becomes easier for non-traditional colleges to get RA the DETC schools will switch rails, too.

    The CSU PhD is inevitable. The UC objections will become moot as the economic reality of having to compete with the growing number of accessible for-profits overshadows the original vision of the CSU system.
     
  19. Anthony Pina

    Anthony Pina Active Member

    A similar situation has occurred with ACICS, which has recently upped its requirements for faculty who teach general education courses from possessing a bachelors degree to possessing a masters degree (the same as the requirement for SACS). Since the system that I work for is rather unique (it has both RA-SACS and NA-ACICS accredited institutions), we have always had students at our NA schools taking general education courses at our RA school. We will not be affected by the recent changes, but other schools will.

    We are already seeing this question ("why would schools continue with you if you are requiring the same thing as the regional accrediting agency?") being asked of the ACICS folks. Things should get interesting in this area (and will undoubtedly spark a number of fun discussions here at Degreeinfo).
     
  20. Tireman 44444

    Tireman 44444 Well-Known Member


    I knew that. I am working on a DA from a DETC accredited school. Thanks for clarifying.
     

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