RA’s don’t actually discriminate against DETC it turns out;just no one had asked them

Coach Turner: "I'd like to give this a shot. Could you provide your method and maybe something along the results or data? Would this sort of thing be publishable somewhere?"

John: Oh, good. If I were doing it again, I would make it a much much simpler survey. In 2000, I was also trying to learn about all kinds of other categories: State Approved in states with strong laws; State Approved in states with weak laws; Accreditation by places like St. Kitts, and so on. 13 categories in all. And I actually had a 7-point scale, from "always" to "never."

Since the vast majority of relevant nationally-accredited schools are DETC-accredited, I think that the only question really needed is something like this:

For purposes of credit transfer and degree acceptance, does your school accept credits and degrees from schools accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC):
( ) Always ( ) Usually ( ) Sometimes ( ) Rarely ( ) Never

Another factor which I subsequently came to realize may be relevant is whether the courses of the DETC-accredited school have also been evaluated by the American Council on Educations Credit Evaluation Service. Eleven DETC-accredited schools have been, and some registrars have told me that those are more likely to be acceptable (http://www.detc.org/ACEcredtRecomm.html).

And another factor could well be what Mr. Lady suggests: that you attempt to learn, either in multiple choice or narrative response, whether the policy has undergone recent change, and how it was reached.

Next question: how do you get your survey into the hands of registrars and admissions officers? My recollection is that about 4,000 of them are members of AACRAO, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRArg), and roughly half of these come to the annual convention each early spring.

I didn't ask AACRAO for a list. A directory is provided to members, but I don't know if it can properly be used for this purpose. I purchased a list of 3,000 registrars from a mailing list broker, on labels, for (as I recall) about 10 cents each. 3,000 was the minimum. I mailed to every third name, and got about 200 responses. Then I mailed a second time to the 800 who had not responded, and got about 130 more.

Another option would be to try emailing them. Mailing list companies supply email addresses. And both mailing and email addresses of registrars and admmissions officers can be harvested yourself from the Higher Education Directory, published every October, and sold for about $80. They also supply the contents on a CD for an added cost.

And yet another would be to try to work with the very active List-Serv that registrars use (don't have the name handy).

And the most interesting of all might be to show up at the AACRAO convention (This year: Orlando, March 24-27) and stand at the door passing out survey forms -- or try to make a deal with AACRAO to make them available at their booth or, better still, included in the convention handouts.

Yes, I would think it is eminently publishable, if done with rigor, both the survey and the analysis. (I was fortunate in that Rich Douglas, far more adept with sophisticated statistical analysis than I, performed detailed analysis of the results. The Inferential Analysis started with a one-level, one-factor Analysis of Variance, which showed there were some statistically significant differences between means. After considering many options, he chose to use the Tukey T test, considering Bonferoni Adjustments.)

Since I didn't see publishing as a career move, but I did want to get the results out in public, I applied to do a presentation of the results at the annual AACRAO national convention -- that year in Seattle. They decided that it would be of sufficient interest to make it not just a speech, but a whole convention session, chaired by Jason Vorderstrasse (a registrar who used to post occasionally on DegreeInfo), with a lot of input from the registrars in attendance, including repeated showing of hands on certain specific schools ("How many of you accept Berne...?."

Well, that went on, didn't it. As you can see, I still have more than passing interest in the topic. Part II (in my dreams) was to do a similar survey with corporate HR people . . . which Rich addressed in far more detail, later, in his Ph.D. research.

If I can help privately, I'd be glad to try, as time permits . . . but I may well have said it all here.

If you do go forth with this, please keep the forum (and/or me) posted.

John Bear

 

PS: I just remembered that at the time, I wished I had included a "( ) Don't know," or ( ) "Our school doesn't have a clear policy on this matter" option. Might be surprising/depressing how many there are.

 

☺ I'm a bit excited - I can do this... and to follow in such eminent footsteps too. Let's see how I can get this started and how I can collect/harvest/buy some contact information.

accepting suggestions from the group.

The survey question is:

For purposes of credit transfer and degree acceptance, does your school accept credits and degrees from schools accredited by the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC):
( ) Always ( ) Usually ( ) Sometimes ( ) Rarely ( ) Never ( ) No Policy/Don't Know
Comments:

I think I'd want to include some demographics as well and maybe include other national accreditors as well as ACE recommendations in the same manner.

I'm leaning toward an electronic contact and survey with a mail follow up for non-responders.

Thank y'all for a great project idea.

 

For the most reliable (and least expensive) email list of nearly all the registrars and admissions officers, go to the Higher Education Directory. I see that their digital version is $125 for a year's use . . . but, get this, they have a fourteen-day free trial. In those fourteen days, you could send out emails to all of the 3 or 4 thousand relevant people. No added cost . . . and if you got more replies than your research design required -- no problem. Just more data and more demographic information. http://www.hepinc.com/digital.htm

Are rural schools more or less likely than urban to accept NA?
Bigger schools versus smaller.
Private versus public.
Religious versus secular.
Ones that have DL programs versus those that don't.
Ones with graduate schools versus those without.
And on and on. What fun. My data analysis neurons are quivering.

 

Could you use something like SurveyMonkey.com for an online response?

 

John is very kind regarding my contributions. My main goal was to determine whether or not the differences in acceptability we saw in the survey results were significant statistically. I offered to do it after finding out about his survey results; I wasn't involved in the design, nor its execution.

I purposely did not include an "I Don't Know" in my survey of HR professionals. (The survey instrument--and the research questions it exlored--were quite different than John's survey.) I felt that when they were faced with someone's resume and/or application, they had to make a decision, even if they were not familiar with a particular school and/or its type of institutional recognition. Even if, in real situations, they "didn't know," they would still have to do something. (Or do nothing, which is still doing something--not to decide IS to decide.) I was interested in what they did in this air of uncertainty. As John hinted regarding his AACRAO survey, the results were both illuminating and depresssing. But, I felt, more revealing than a simple "I Don't Know." But for AACRAO officials, that category might be more revealing about the research question at hand.

If doing the survey online, consider www.surveyz.com. They had, when I did mine, a splendedly priced academic option. However, consider the very low return rates you will experience--sending an email, asking them to click on a link, having them fill out the survey, etc., all contribute to this. If your sample and/or population is small, you might not get responses in sufficient numbers to infer much regarding your question. Also, if the survey content itself is relatively simple, don't make the process complicated. I like the idea of a three- or four-question survey done on-the-spot. You could print it up on a card and have them dropped off in a box at the convention, for example.

Finally, watch those Bonferroni Adjustments. You could pull a hammy if you're not stretched out first.

 

While qualitative and involving a bit more work, I would urge a follow up question asking why their policy is what it is. I’m beginning to suspect that in some cases the institutions think they have to do this because of their accreditation, when in fact, as I have just verified, that is not the case.

When I talked to the administrative person reviewing credentials at the local CC, they told me flat out, very nicely but still in no uncertain terms, that they only used RA credentials because of SACS. After more research this turns out not to be true, but the administrator believed it to be true…. If you get my point, we need some context to understand why the answers are what they are……

 

David makes a good point . . . which leads to the issue of whether schools have a clear and unambiguous policy, or if (heaven forfend) each evaluator has some leeway in making decisions. I seem to remember a fair number of inquiries on the registrars' List-Serv in the form of, "Hey, any of you guys know about [such and such a school]?" Many but not all for non-US schools.

Here is AACRAO's "Guide to Useful List-Servs" for Registrars and Admissions Officers. It would seem that there are several that would be relevant for this project. http://www.aacrao.org/useful_links/listserv.cfm

John

 

I think that many schools see their accreditation as the standard that they set for themselves. So that implies that it's also the standard that they set for their students and faculty, and for the credit and degrees that they accept.

Demanding that accredited schools accept credits and degrees from schools with different accreditation, implies that the school's chosen standard isn't really its standard at all.

Now there's a new idea of equivalence. The new standard is the school's own accreditation... or a whole fuzzy cloud of alternatives that somebody judges to be equivalent, despite their actually being different. (The arguments are about how significant the differences are.) It isn't clear who gets to define how all that works in practice.

But if anyone suggests that non-accredited schools or non-"recognized" (by whom?) accreditors be accepted, everyone will immediately get their backs up. So this "equivalence" stuff isn't just empty words, it's still a tangible line that's placed somewhere... just not where those who used regional accreditation had placed it.

So, what Degreeinfo seems to be calling for boils down to two fundamental things.

1. The accreditation line's being moved. It's moving away from where the regional accreditors placed it toward the lowest common denominator of all of the recognized accreditors.

2. The power to draw the line is being taken away from the accrediting associations themselves and being handed to... somebody else, to whoever ultimately defines what 'equivalent' does and doesn't include.

 

1 - No, I don’t think so, at least for me I’m talking specifically about DETC, who’s institutions meet exactly the same standards (at least according to the DETC web site).

2 – No again, nothing is being taken away from anyone, the regional accrediting associations have never imposed this RA bias, which is the discovery that I made last week. It is a myth. Each institution gets to make their own decisions, no line is being moved, no lowest common denominator embraced, and there is no policy from the regional accrediting institutions that has to change because it doesn’t exist in the first place.

The entire bias and belief that DETC is somehow inferior is fiction that we have talked ourselves into. It is less accepted right now, I think because it is both newer and only recently started allowing terminal degrees. But that is wholesale different than inferior.

 

When schools seek regional accreditation, it isn't to prove that all other forms of accreditation are inferior or superior. It is simply a standard by which they choose to do business. A college or university that has sought and obtained regional accreditation accepts other regionally accredited college credits and degrees as a standard that they have chosen to achieve and maintain. It is unreasonable to insist that regionally accredited schools should accept non-RA credits or degrees when that is the standard that they have chosen to achieve.

 

Who says that?

I've questioned it in the past because (a) some of the schools they chose to accredit did some messed up things right before accreditation and (b) for many years, no school accredited by DETC but not simultaneously pursuing regional accreditation had gone on to RA. At the same time, schools that fell into their scope (either because they got DETC while pursuing RA, or were designed to be distance-only like JIU) did get RA. This began to look like DETC accredited schools that couldn't make the RA grade. Now we have at least one school, AMU, that's made the leap. But the issue still, largely, stands.

I don't understand what "allowing terminal degrees" has to do with it, when it (DETC accreditation) had plenty of acceptance issues (in both academia and in employment) with the degrees it did issue. We don't really have any idea what the acceptability and utility of terminal (doctoral) degrees will be. (My guess: almost none for use in teaching in higher education; lots more in employment circles, very similar to the current situation with bachelor's and master's degrees.)

Yes, "not as accepted" is different from "inferior." But don't count out "inferior" just yet. I'd like to see more evidence. And I'd like to see what kind of scholarship doctoral candidates from DETC-accredited schools accomplish, and what kind of commitment to scholarship these schools display.

I've always been bullish about DETC, while recognizing the limitations involved with non-RA accreditation. But I think the RA schools are going to render DETC irrelevant in its current, institutional accreditor form.

(NB: I work with a department of a university accredited by DETC but, obviously, not drawing its institutional recognition as a degree-grantor from DETC.)

 

Please take my comments about "inferior" with some temperance. IMHO, there are some really cool schools accredited by DETC.

 

Bias is given to the highest degree earned, so IMHO, without terminal degrees you’re not comparing apples.

I’m not suggesting that we should compare Aspen to Harvard or anything, and I agree that in most visible cases DETC schools look like tier 5 or 6 schools (yes I know there is no such thing but I’m illustrating my point..).. or really they look like CC's...

I work full time in non-academic pursuits, as I suspect most DETC accredited institution graduates do, meaning that most of my professional contributions are not on academic radar. Additionally, DETC schools look much more like CC’s than universities even though they carry the university title (although I’m noticing that Harrison Middleton seems pretty active publishing books and sponsoring great books conferences…); DETC institutions generally pay their instructors to teach not research and publish. My only point in all of this is that I can tell, from firsthand experience, that the DL education any number of RA institutions provide is at exactly the same standard as what the DETC institutions provide, and I find it incomprehensible that the only difference of acceptance, at the CC adjunct level, seems to be bureaucratic in nature, and based upon misunderstood and non-existent guidelines. And are imployed in a way that precludes the examination of a person’s credentials as an entire body of work, because the right boxes don’t get checked on the entry form.

What I have found is that the professional success of DETC grads seems high, it just is not the success that academia recognizes, which I think paints a picture that we’re misinterpreting as inferior, when in reality it is just different…

 

Are we opining here that it's possible at some institutions that they don't accept DETC transfer simply because "someone said that SACS said that we can't" and "that's the way we've always done it"? I suspect that it's deeper than that but it's an interesting question.

Can someone offer a simple survey question that would clarify this but remain neutral. I'm trying to write this such that any questions are not leading.

Maybe something like:

[] The policy of our accreditor does not allow us to accept DETC ....

Thoughts? I really want to keep it as neutral as possible while getting a valid study.

Thanks for all the advice so far. ☺

 

I don't think its quite that simple. Where accreditation standards may be silent on DETC, there is an issue with the personalities on an accreditation review team. A school can perceive that a review team might/would interpret the broad statements in accreditation standards as not accepting DETC.

There can be considerable variation between accreditation review teams acting for the same accreditor. I can easily see a situation where a majority of a team would view DETC negatively.

 

I certainly have no basis to disagree with this thread. However, if a prospective student asked which is preferable - RA or DETC - I'd point out RA, especially if the student thought they might go on for graduate study.

Why? Some of the graduate schools that accept DETC may do so on an "exception" basis. Do you really want to have to explain your degree?

Other schools (for example, the DBA, EdD or PhD programs in CS/CIS at NSU) simply state: "Proof of graduation from a regionally accredited institution with a conferred Master's or Doctoral degree". You'll have little or no chance here without an RA degree.

Is DETC inferior? I don't know. Will it open the same doors as an RA degree? Nope. But then are all RA degrees the same? Nope.

Regards - Andy

 

Unfortunately the bias exists in academia. The CHEA-recognized ACBSP, the professional business accreditor of NCU only accredits RA schools in the US.

 

I don’t disagree with any of this, expect to point out that the status quo need not be the status quo forever…

 

Summed up quite nicely.

Abner