New School, new degree mill?

Hello.. i have a question for the DL gurus of DegreeInfo:
When a new college starts and the state license is granted for the school to grant legal degrees... what would prevent or how the people in charge of the school could avoid the motto "degree mill" since they are not yet accredited and for example the DETC accreditation takes 2 years...?

 

Always a challenging question, but there are a fair number of signs that point out the difference between a school making a sincere effort and one that's going through the motions.

One of the things that we've started working on (in the early stages at this point) is the DegreeInfo Acceptability Index, which will be a numerically weighted scoring system that looks at a variety of factors (everything from number of faculty members, % of unaccredited or homegrown degrees among faculty to lack of accreditation in a diploma mill-friendly state to mailing address, and about 20 other criteria.)

The idea is that eventually we'll have something akin to FICO credit scoring that will be based entirely on objective, factual information. So while we won't describe any given school as a diploma mill (unless somebody else has done so in print), we will be able to assign scores and say "the majority of schools that score at this level are likely to be diploma mills" or "The majority of schools scoring at this level are sincere schools providing, as near as we can tell, a quality education."

Which is a very long way of saying that right now, there isn't any absolutely solid criteria someone could give that answer your question, but we hope there will be before too long.

You might also check our "Ten Signs of a Less-Than-Wonderful School" article.

 

Excellent question. I've been kind of struggling with it myself.

My basic principle is that if a school isn't accredited, it needs to be able to present some other evidence of its credibility. That can take many forms I guess. I'll draw some examples from new California schools.

California State University, Monterey Bay is due to get its final accreditation this year, but nobody has seriously doubted it. It's a state university and the keynote speaker at its opening ceremony was no less than the President of the United States.

Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences is still just CA-approved, but it's already a part of the Claremont College consortium and is funded by the high-profile Keck Foundation.

City of Hope only received accreditation recently for its tiny (33 student) biotechnology doctoral program, but it is the research arm of a large medical center.

The American Film Institute only recently had its degree program accredited by WASC, but it's well... the American Film Institute.

Hsi Lai University is a candidate for RA that put together an impressive curriculum and gathered together a strong faculty to teach it. Among its target audience it's a plus that it's closely related to the largest Buddhist temple/monastic complex outside Asia.

Expression Center for New Media (CA-approved) has strong financial backing, very impressive facilities and puts out some excellent student work. It seems to be getting a very good reception from its industry.

Campion College started up recently, but it has historical and staff connections back to the University of San Francisco's former St. Ignatius Institute.

Intercultural Institute of California tried for regional accreditation and apparently was turned down due to limited resources. (It operates out of a house and only has one degree program.) But IIC has demonstrated some academic credibility and has entered into a joint-degree arrangement with the RA CIIS.

OK, what themes can we recognize here?

1. Ancestry. Credible universities don't arise out of a vacuum. They have histories. Who started them, and what were the creators doing previously?

2. Achievable goals. Credible universities don't appear overnight offering Ph.D. programs in every imaginable subject as if they were major research universities. They usually have a specialty (biotechnology, film, digital art, Buddhist studies or whatever) and try to handle it well.

3. Resources. Credible universities have adaquate funding and facilities to pull off whatever they are attempting. Since in most cases funding and resources are limited, goals have to remain commensurate.

4. Recognition. Who is talking about the new school? Does it get any notice by the scholarly and professional communities? And...

5. Participation. Does the new school participate in the life of its field? It it producing any work?

I notice that none of my examples are 100% DL. In fact, most offer little or no DL.

DL doesn't change my themes, but it does make them a little harder to evaluate. If a school is "virtual", presumably it doesn't have facilities that can easily be inspected. It isn't nearly as clear what kind of resources it has, and that means that it isn't as obvious whether or not it can successfully realize its ambitions.

That probably shifts more weight to the questions of who created the school and whether or not the school is getting any positive notice by the professional and academic worlds.

 

And, of course, City of Hope is one of the most famous institutions in the history of biotechnology -- it's where somatostatin, human growth hormone, and other human genes were first expressed in recombinant hosts. Genentech was launched based on the promise of these results. And Genentech's current monoclonal antibody franchise rests upon IP from City of Hope (the famous Cabilly patent suite). So City of Hope's pedigree in the field of biotechnology is second to none -- not even to Stanford or UCSF.