Oregon school definitions

As Bill Huffman has already mentioned, the "Three Strikes" law only applies to felonies. The Oregon law is not a felony.

I'd be willing to apply the "Three Strikes" principle to bogus degrees. If you are convicted of using a bogus degree three or more times, you get 30 days in jail for each count. That would send the message so loud & clear that even the folks on the K-WU Pub might even get it.

 

Bill, Bruce,

Thanks for the clarification. So in essence only the manufacturer or seller of the unacceptable degree could be found guilty of the 3 strike law since that is the felony?

Back to my unaccredited degree scenario. Many federal officials have recently been identified with both bogus and unaccredited degrees. Does Oregon (or any other state) intend to pursue penalties to any of these folks that reside in Oregon? If not, why not?

Has Oregon, or does Oregon intend to follow the path of the federal government and research their own employees for discrepancies? If found, what course of action will be taken?

The problem is that Oregon, just like the federal government, is setting a standard and yet there is no mention of how that standard has first been (or if ever) applied within their own ranks.

My point is that the law should be applied without prejudice.

As an aside, I am one of those folks with accredited degrees who has an individual with unaccredited degrees in a position above me. I would love for the federal government to enforce a criminal penalty. (any bets on that) Would be some nice upward mobility.

 

That brings up an interesting question. The Oregon law prohibits people, after they receive a warning, from claiming that they have a substandard academiic degree. Certainly if a person submits a job application with a substandard degree, they have claimed the degree. But what if the job application was submitted before the Oregon law was passed, or in another state, and they are now holding a job with the same employer. Does continuing to hold the job mean they are claiming the degree?

 

An interesting set of issues. We are going to make some changes to our web site in the weeks ahead. One thing we could do is simply post the instructions for what to do if you have an unaccredited degree as a PDF document.

The question of how to deal with people who work here temporarily or who are in effect self-employed but happen to have a degree from Big Al's College is one that we have been picking at for some time.

Our current policy (admittedly informal) is that a person who is self-employed and who does not use the degree to attract customers or improve her professional standing inside the state is not "using" the degree in the state. We have applied this theory twice in the case of people whose main work is writing professional books. The Commissioners do not like this approach and have asked me to investigate whether it is too lenient. Their concern is that they don't want Oregon to look like it accepts the credentials as valid.

A person who comes here for six months has the same obligation to abide by the law as I would visiting Texas for six months and claiming to be an architect. I do not meet state legal requirements.

As always, my view is that we should stop requiring degrees for a lot of jobs. When I made that comment as a guest speaker at the CHEA conference on international use of substandard degrees in Washington, DC yesterday, I was astonished that half the audience said "right on" or words to that effect. They were college officials, accreditors and international visitors with similar roles in their own countries.

I think this issue is one of the unmentionable elephants that takes up a lot of space in discussions of degree fraud: society should stop requiring degrees for a lot of jobs, and therefore stop expecting every "real person" to go to college. I am going to prepare an essay on it for the Chronicle of Higher Ed and see how much trouble I can get in.

 

First, I'd like to applaud your positon that degrees should not be required for so many jobs. Requiring unnecessary degrees just creates tempation for people to use degree mills.

As for the architect analogy, it really does not quite fit, in that using the title "architect" or doing architecture requires a state license. In contrast, being, for example, a computer consultant, requires neither a degree nor a license, as far as the law is concerned. If a person gets a computer consulting job in California and mentions a sub-standard degree on his job application, and later is sent to Oregon by the same company, it can be argued he isn't using the degree, unless he mentions it to someone while in Oregon. After all, he doesn't need any degree to be a computer consultant.

 

Regarding the following web page
http://www.osac.state.or.us/oda/unaccredited.html

Mr. Contreras, I notice that the list of institutions whose degrees are illegal for use in Oregon no longer has a column with a sub category listed. While I enjoyed that additional tidbit of information, I agree with your decision that it was probably best to drop it and thereby avoid any possible entanglements that it might cause.

I do have question though. Is there a way to tell the difference between unaccredited institutions that have not been evaluated and ones that have been evaluated? Okay the web site lists a dozen that have clearly been evaluated and found to be acceptable even though they are unaccredited. Should there be or is there any information as to who has been evaluated and judged unacceptable?

Thanks,

 

The "code" column has been dropped but will be replaced this week by a more detailed comments column. We are going to describe a lot of suppliers as having "no evidence of meeting the standards required by Oregon law" rather than using the term "substandard" that is currently in rule.

I think the term "substandard," although technically accurate, carries too much baggage. When the commission reviews the rules this fall I am thinking of asking them to substitute the term "nonstandard." Any comments from the list?

We have not listed the schools that have been rejected upon review because so far there is only one, and since that one is not a diploma mill I am hesitant to hang it out there in the wind all by itself.

We are currently involved in two other reviews and may add a third. If we eventually get a cluster of them I may have a separate list.

Has anyone out there read a book dating to about 1964 called "The Sheepskin Psychosis" by John Keats? A splendid overview of, in effect, why we should de-emphasize degrees.

 

I think the word "nonstandard" is a good idea. As for what to do about the one found to be substandard (here I mean without the added baggage ), I think a comment like you just made would be sufficient.

The ODA found this school did not meet the standards required by Oregon law so it is unacceptable to use degrees from this school in Oregon.

Make it plain and simple, I know that people have complained in the past about how the list of apparantly unacceptable schools mixes degree mills with barely unacceptable. I don't think that your job is to necessarily differentiate between differing degrees of acceptability. So I think that it's fair to consider such a complaint irrelevant.

 

I'm interested in how the ODA conducts a review of a school. Do you examine the catalog, interview faculty and students, look at course materials? How do you explain the fact that one of the CA unaccredited schools (SCUPS) that has a Ph.D. approved for use in Oregon has been flatly denied accreditation by the DETC while the only CA unaccredited school the ODA has found substandard was not denied but deferred, indicating that apparantly the DETC thinks they have a good chance of meeting criteria for accreditation by the Jan. 05 meeting?

 

It equally amazed me too, on what basis ODA approve schools. SCUPS is a classic example, they have a PhD program approved while SCUPS sells degree in this part of the world. I would very much like to see that ODA labels SCUPS as a plain diploma mill.

Peter Chin

 

Hi Peter.

Could you please expand on this?

How does SCUPS offer its courses in your part of the world? Who is selling their degrees? How? Do your local SCUPS courses come out of SCUPS itself in Santa Ana, or are they franchised to a local organization of some kind?

My impression of SCUPS has always been that they are kind of a blah unexciting mid-level CA-approved school. Reasonably honest but certainly not very impressive.

But I'm sometimes wrong. So tell us what you know.

 

I see a potential problem.

If the ODA is approving distant schools without the site visits and elaborate studies the accreditors perform, we might find the Oregon state government in the uncomfortable position of declaring, in effect, that non-accredited universities around the world are "equivalent" to accredited ones.

I suspect that Mr. Contreras might soon receive a bunch of applications from doubtful schools in various states and countries who want ODA approval for use in their advertising. And ODA approval seems a lot easier to acquire than regional accreditation or a British university charter. (But probably harder than African "accreditation".)

So Oregon needs to take care that it doesn't let itself become a back-door kinda-sorta-"accreditor" of questionable mystery schools. Don't be too easy.

 

It's a tricky game.

The biggest catch-all is that it has to be legally operating in it's jurisdiction. I am sure legally operating should be more than merely registered. It should mean operating under the knowledge and acceptance of the local authority.

I always have a problem with schools that are licensed in one jurisdiction but operate in another. I always wonder whether the stories they tell the respective governments are identical. Do they have "guest" status in both countries?

 

What we call a "section d" review can be instituted by a degree-holder or a school. It covers only what we call academic issues. The applicant must submit a catalog, list of faculty showing what they teach and what degrees they hold (frequently in the catalog), information on the school's policies on the award of credit, admission requirements and structure and content of curriculum.

We do not examine the school's physical plant, finances, student services, control structures or other issues that are normally examined by an accreditor. Since DETC does not release its evaluation documentation we have no idea why they made the decisions that they made. However, as you know, there is no uniformity of standards even among regional accreditors (consider the Southern Association and North Central), let alone among states, national accreditors etc.

Oregon's approval standard is that a school must be able to show that it "could reasonably be considered for approval" to operate in Oregon, not that it has proven that it can meet every standard we have.

The school we disapproved a few years ago ran afoul of a rule in effect at the time that caused us to use the Western Association's standard for doctoral approvals. Our rule and perhaps theirs has changed since then. We generally do not revisit previous decisions unless there is another application.

 

Alan;

I quess I don't see what purpose is served by perpetuating the classification of a school as "substandard" or "No evidence of meeting the standards required by Oregon" based on information that has been outdated for some time. It's very common knowledge that CCU dropped their Doc. programs about a year ago.

 

The issue for us is not that the school has changed its policies, it is that we have a lot of degree-holders rattling around who got their degrees years ago and either live in Oregon now or could move here next year. The question is whether someone uses such a degree as a credential here today, not whether the school still issues such degrees.

Eventually we work our way back to the basic question of what a degree is for. It is a proxy, not a set of facts. Thus if a person can prove that they have the skills to do a job, whether they hold a degree in that field should, in theory, be irrelevant. However, we live in a society in which we acquire more paper in order to distinguish ourselves from those who have less paper, a process largely unmoored from an individual's ability to perform.

The answer is not to give the benefit of the doubt to any piece of paper labeled "degree," the answer is to evaluate humans, not credentials.

I have submitted an essay for consideration to the Chronicle of HE on this subject.

Our new web list with expanded commentary should be up Thursday. I'll be taking comments and fine-tuning it next week.

 

Another example of an un-named state approved school not being up to snuff (at least at one point in time). I wouldn't be surprised if that school turned out to be CCU. If it actually did turn out to be CCU, it would mean to me that Dennis Ruhl and a number of other CCU fans might owe Mr. Contreras an apology for things they said about him in apparent fits of anger.

Don't tell us the name of the school, I'm enjoying the possibility that it is CCU way too much! Actually Chip really should be charging me for this because I feel guilty having this much fun for free.

 

Anger?? Mr Contreras has a very difficult job applying the Oregon legislation and I'm sure many others would screw it up just as badly as he has.

I don't understand your fascination with CCU. It's one of the better of the hundreds of California approved schools, having survived round 1 of the seemingly never ending DETC accreditation bouts.
.

 

Yes anger, and thanks for a response that would seem to corroborate said anger. (It's not so easy thinking bad things about the guy after reading his delightful posts, is it? )

Being one of the better state approved schools could be interpretted as strong evidence as to how poorly state approved is looked upon by many. (Reference the bad press about CCU, admittedly unfair in some ways but still bad press.)

Another fun thing about CCU is watching people defend the reputation of the school. In part because it doesn't deserve the bad reputation it sometimes receives but in some ways it does deserve it. The reaction and arguments presented is frequently the same as when we get people here defending blatant degree mills. (Why because CCU and degree mills are in the same unaccredited category.)

Another fun thing about CCU is people getting upset when I say that out in the general population many people will automatically assume that CCU is a degree mill simply because it is unaccredited.

Another fun thing about CCU is that you go there.

Another fun thing about CCU is that a lot of DegreeInfo subscribers go there.

Another fun thing about CCU is that it will possibly not be unaccredited at the end of next year which will reduce by a very significant percentage the number of decent unaccredited schools that specialize in distance general education.

Another fun thing about CCU is that their doctorate programs seemed relatively weak and it is most delightful imagining CCU was the ONE school that was evaluated as unacceptable in Oregon because of one of their "nonstandard" doctorate programs. [excuse me for a laughing break] ... [okay thanks, I'm back now] Another fun thing about that is that you talk about enrolling in the CCU doctorate program.

Then there's some other things that I find fun but I'm not going to say since I'm trying so hard to appear kind and thoughtful.