Ph.D. at California Coast University?

The brand new CCU "Spotlight" to which Abner made reference elsewhere, starts off with:
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Beverley Guntley-Brown, Ph.D.
Dr. Guntley-Brown recently graduated from the Doctor of Philosophy in Management program at California Coast University (CCU).
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I had not been aware that CCU was awarding the Ph.D. degree, and I can find no reference to it whatsoever in the 2012 Catalog, or in their description on the DETC site.

I'd be grateful for information/clarification.

 

From google I just found a thread on here from 2005 that was talking about all of the Ph.D graduates from CCU but that doesn't deal with the word "recently" but that is relative.

http://www.degreeinfo.com/general-distance-learning-discussions/18280-california-coast-university.html

 

California Coast was required to drop its PhD programs as part of their applying for DETC accreditation, so there are a lot of California Coast (and, their earlier name, California Western) PhDs out there, but pre-accreditation ones.

 

Yeah, no mention of any Ph.D. programs on their website.

Is it time for the DETC and the State of California to strike them down "with great vengeance"?

 

This site mentions someone with a 1998 (pre-accreditation) Ph.D. in management from CCU.

http://wms.org/about/staff.asp

CCU would not have awarded a doctor of philosophy degree in management (or anything else) since receiving DETC accreditation. "Recently graduated" must mean eight or more years ago.

 

I would be interested to see:

1. How these PhD graduates have done since graduation and what they think of their qualification now?

2. Does the university acknowledge them at all as alumni?

3. What has the university done with the thesis presented by the student? Have any of these be cited in other works?

There is so much written about the quality of these unaccredited PhDs and this university has continued in business for a significant period and has achieved an accreditation status, albeit national and not for the PhD's. It would be interesting to see how the consumer of the education sees it from a distance in time.

 

Mike Lambert, head of DETC, confirms that they had permission to allow already-enrolled PhD students to finish. But CCU has had its accreditation for more than seven years, now. Still seems a bit odd to me.

 

Yes, I personally saw thousands of disertations stored away in a library room. One had four volumes! I would like to invite some of our esteemed Higher Ed members to arrange a visit sometime. PM me and I wil help set the tour up. Seeing all those dissertations elegantly bound was breathtaking! Next time I go I will take pictures.

Abner

 

Abner: "...I personally saw thousands of disertations stored away in a library room. One had four volumes! I would like to invite some of our esteemed Higher Ed members to arrange a visit sometime. PM me and I wil help set the tour up. Seeing all those dissertations elegantly bound was breathtaking! Next time I go I will take pictures.."

John: A great improvement over my visit in the early 80s, when founder Tom Neal (Sr.) gave me the grand tour. In the library, there was one wall of open shelves full of dissertations; on the other wall, the dissertations were in locked cabinets, behind (as I recall) wire mesh screens. Neal said to me that those were ones that were so "God-awful," they didn't want anyone looking at them, but they had to keep them on display in case the authors came by. For the record, Tom Neal (Jr.) denies this happened, and has called me a liar for saying it. Such is life. I was there.

I could even pinpoint the day, because Neal told me proudly that state Superintendent of Public Instruction WIlson Riles was coming to visit for the first time that afternoon. At that time, Neal's office had a lot of Confederate memorabilia on display. Neal clearly did not know that Riles is African-American. It might have been an interesting meeting.

PS: As I have said many times, I would dearly love to see a "Turing Test" of dissertations, and CCU would be a perfect school to do it. In such a test, an impartial person selects five dissertations randomly (in a given field) from the shelves at CCU, and five in the same field are chosen randomly from the shelves at UCLA (or comparable). The ten dissertations are photocopied, covering up any reference to the school. They are "shuffled" and given to five experts in that field, who are asked to read and evaluate and grade them. If there is no significant difference, that's a fantastic marketing point for CCU. And if there is, then that is very useful information, too.

I would be happy to orchestrate and pay for such an experiment, if CCU would cooperate. Or I would be happy to sit on the sidelines and watch as someone who might be more acceptable to CCU did it. What say?

 

In respect of the alumni, I am rightly or wrongly of the mind that a school, which in my Australian idiom is "fair dinkum", will value its alumni, where one that is simply in for the bucks will post out the diploma and forget them. The fact that the students work is bound and is displayed in a respectful manner goes towards valuing the students, albeit only some way.

An unaccredited school that adopted the process outlined by Dr Bear would have to be considered more favorably and, indeed, if they opened up to scrutiny like this, the issue of accreditation starts to disappear in terms of academia.

It probably would not with employers who are not going to bother to check these details, but then the quality of the graduates would most likely speak for the university.

 

That is a very interesting story! That is the two separated categories. The other part of the story makes it an amusing story in addition. Why would they bother having two separated categories? Perhaps if they were asked for a copy of a dissertation they send it out if from the good side but decline if from the bad side? Can anyone think of another explanation?

 

Hey John,
Can you not order a representative sample from ProQuest from CCU and another school of your choice. This should be really interesting. I hope you are doing well.
Howard Rodgers

 

Part of the issue is that CCU dissertations have not been available via Proquest or any other source. A recent search of my institution's Proquest Theses & Dissertations turned up nothing from California Coast University. To view a dissertation, one has had to go to CCU and obtain permission. Some dissertations, such as Walter Martin's 1976 "expose" on the Jehovah's Witnesses were not available for evaluation--even upon request (but Martin is a whole other story).

 

Starting over ten years ago UMI (AKA Proquest AKA The name of the company changed several times in this period, from University Microfilms to Xerox University Microfilms, to University Microfilms International, then shortened to UMI. Wikipedia) stopped listing dissertations from unaccredited dissertation. Here's more detail about UMI back in about 1999. Derek Smart's PhD Fraud Supporting Background Information

 

Interesting. Trinity (Indiana) does have three dissertations on file. I assume that they included them either due to age or confusion about the whole Trinity Liverpool issue since the heading does say Trinity Col and Sem in COOP with U of Liverpool.

ProQuest Subject Index - TRINITY COL AND SEM IN COOP WITH THE U OF LIVERPOOL

Edit: My bad. Only one dissertation repeated under three categories.

 

If the dissertation cannot be listed on an independent service, then perhaps the unaccredited university can publish it electronically from its library or website. The internet has opened up information and an unaccredited. legitimate agency has ample opportunity to value/honor its students by publishing the dissertations on the web.

If scholarship has any meaning at all, then it has to provide some service for the public good and publishing research does that. There should be two principal objectives. The first is to enable the individual to reach his or her full potential in doing the degree and the second is to provide some service to the public good in the process. Ultimately, by providing meaning to the work by publishing is honoring your student's achievement.

It is a little like the mercenary and the soldier argument. The soldier fights for himself, his comrades, his unit, and his country (probably in that order) while the mercenary is quite singular, he/she, in the main, fights for money. A university may be for profit (nothing wrong with this in my eyes), but it does not have to sacrifice the public good that is achieved by scholarship, nor deny the student the honor that is achieved through very hard work. This is adopting the mercenary mentality.

 

This illustrates a significant problem with unaccredited schools. A doctoral dissertation (or thesis) is supposed to be a published work that adds to the literature and theory-building in one's field. But it cannot be if it is not routinely available for use by other scholars. In this day and age, that means it must be able to be found by search engines. Two really good ones for dissertations are Proquest and Google Scholar. But Proquest only accepts dissertations from accredited schools and Google Scholar draws from Proquest's database.

Let's say a doctoral student is, oh, I don't know, doing research about the phenomenon of the Chief Learning Officer role in corporations and other organizations. In doing so, the doctoral student conducts a literature review to (a) identify and critique the scholarly work in the field and (b) develop an armchair theory that will be tested deductively. (Or, contrarily, the doctoral student might use the literature as one of many data sources in building a grounded theory by inductive means. In either case, the same principle applies.) When the doctoral student does his/her research into the literature (before developing and testing research questions or hypotheses in deductive research or during data collection by continuous analysis in inductive research), he/she will not find the CCU Ph.D.'s dissertation. Thus, students doing research as part of their doctoral programs at unaccredited schools will NOT be included in literature reviews and, thus, will not be considered part of the literature. Because one of the traditional requirements of the Ph.D. is that the dissertation makes an original contribution to the field of study, Ph.D. programs at unaccredited schools fail. This is despite some really good work being done at a few of them (like WISR). Sorry, but that's the way it is.

I like John's test. He's been suggesting it for quite some time now. But the fact that it cannot be carried out without the permission and participation of the unaccredited school in question just goes to illustrate my point. It isn't part of the knowledge if no one can know it.

Here's one we can try: Are there instances where holders of doctoral degrees from unaccredited schools have published in peer-reviewed journals? I'd like to narrow this to finding out if there are people with Ph.D.'s from unaccredited schools who took their doctoral dissertations and had smaller versions of them published in peer-reviewed journals, but it might be too hard to verify the dissertation topic. (Again, because of the unavailability of the author's dissertation.) So.....I wonder if there are authors of academic journal articles holding doctorates from unaccredited schools? It might be worth a look.

Longtime participants in these fora may remember my more-open stance regarding unaccredited schools, especially (a) good ones and (b) pre-accredited ones. As teaching institutions, some are/were pretty good. But they are not members of the academy. Nor are their doctoral graduates. Sorry.

 

I would love to see what that man wrote in it. I bet they have burned it by now.