National Accreditation Gets Slammed

Non-RA accreditors will need something that makes them distinctive, something that differentiates them from the regionals. The specialized accreditors obviously have that. The ABA is all about law and is specified in most states' bar-admissions standards. TRACS obviously has its very conservative oriention to scriptural authority. That's why it's classified as a religious accreditor along with ATS and AARTS.

DETC and ACICS are a little more problematic because they are general accreditors, accrediting less specialized schools offering diverse subjects. DETC does have its DL focus, but RA schools are doing that too, so it doesn't differentiate DETC very well.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between ACICS/DETC and the regionals is that the former acceditors are willing to accredit smaller proprietary schools that might not have sufficient resources to clear all of the RA hurdles. Unfortunately, that particular distinctive won't do much for the smaller accreditors' comparative credibility.

As you say, those 'NA' schools that grow to the point that they can crash the RA club are likely to make the move unless there's some compelling reason for them to hang around. TRACS might have more (doctrinal) attraction in that regard than DETC or ACICS.

I wish. (I'm a CSU guy.) But I'm not holding my breath.

There was a big push a year or so ago to permit CSU to do selected "professional" doctorates. But that effort evaporated with the only positive result being the CSU getting legal permission to award Ed.D.s. UC was probably willing to sign off on that one since it didn't fundamentally change their assertion that CSUs are just teacher's colleges while UC is the true state university.

That leaves a number of the CSUs with masters programs that are more exciting and more productive than some universities' doctoral programs in the same subjects. In terms of capabilities and resources, the CSU system could roll out a number of fairly-solid Ph.D. programs in less than a month if they were just allowed to do it.

The thing is, DETC already has permission to do many things that the CSU system can't do. It can award D.Sc. degrees (great for technical subjects) and D.A. degrees (great for the humanities). Harrison Middleton has taken up the latter opportunity, though the results remain to be seen.

So arguments that it's unrealistic to expect DETC/ACICS schools to generate any intellectual interest or excitement until they are allowed to award Ph.D.s, when the CSU system manages to do some cool things without offering doctoral programs at all, just isn't very convincing to me.

 

Academic reputations are an interesting study, at least to me. Sometimes reputations are improved or worsened, fairly or unfairly. One thing that seems clear is that reputation always seems to have a significant subjective element. That is inherient in the very nature of reputation itself. While my perception is that the DETC reputation seems to have improved some over the past few years, I still don't think that it is equal to RA and I personally doubt that it will ever be equal to RA, simply because it will always be smaller, less known and less presitigous. Of course that is my own subjective opinion and I'm not trying to address the fairness issue.