Two Schools Lapse on Accreditation

Ummmm....John Bear's research with admissions officials. My research with HR officials. DETC's own surveys with graduates. Anecdotal examples galore. They all point to the same issue: degrees from schools accredited by DETC are--in some situations--categorically rejected. This is never the case with RA. This isn't overstating it. It's just saying it.

Sorry, but "start up" overstates things tremendously. Almost no DETC-accredited schools have gone on to RA. Yes, a few have earned DETC accreditation first, but they applied for it and RA simultaneously. APUS has made the move. I can't recall if there have been any others. But DETC has accredited many schools for many years, far beyond what any reasonable person would consider "start up." And the notion that a school goes to DETC first as a start up in order to establish itself for RA later is almost completely disproved by the evidence. Perhaps that will change in the future, but it's just not true in the present.

No. For example, schools often have to gain approval from their accrediting agency(ies) to add program(s).

Red herring. No one is saying that. I, for one, said quite the opposite in this very thread.

 

This isn't true. He made some sweeping statements without support and a few people asked him for details. Nothing wrong with that.

Sorry, but you have to bring something else to the table besides a baseless insinuation. Who has what ulterior motive? And what constitutes "going bananas"?

Really? You know this? Besides, the focus was on the utility of degrees offered by these schools, not just the educative process. In many instances in the past, DETC has been shown to fail to follow their own rules regarding accreditation. Accrediting schools using deceptive practices (like claiming fake accreditation up until the day DETC accredited them), accrediting schools that clearly do not fall within their scope (and who award degrees beyond what DETC can accredit). This information is publicly available, if you're willing to look.

Really? Then why is it all the evidence in this question over the years has been on the opposite side of the issue? If you have information to the contrary, put it out there. But so far you're just engaging in unsupported conjecture. Fine, but you can't use unsupported conjecture as a counter-argument to well-supported arguments. Well, you can, but expect someone to call you on it.

This song gets played over and over again. But the more people shout about DETC's accreditation being comparable, the more they lose that argument. Then they get mad and make claims of bias. Fine, show us the bias. Where is it? I've been asking to be shown how I am biased against DETC for years. I've been asking for anything that shows I have an agenda, hidden or otherwise.

Bring it on.

 

A degree from a DETC-accredited institution is inferior, strictly speaking. Some employers and schools will not accept degrees from any NA school to meet educational requirements. I feel safe saying there are no employers or schools that will refuse to accept a degree from an RA school on the basis of the school's regional accreditation.

 

Indeed. But the situation hasn't changed, just the parade of people wishing it would.

I would much rather be a fan and supporter of the underdog DETC.

 

I'd like to present an idea that might serve as a litmus test or at least a signpost that indicates that DETC programs are approaching RA programs. We all know that Harrison Middleton University caused a bit of a stir when they unveiled their Doctor of Arts degree program. We don't hear much about it. I don't think that any of those doctoral candidates have ever posted here on any topic. Here's my idea. If one of these people ever gets hired into a tenure track professorship at an RA university then you might rightfully claim that "the establishment" has accepted DETC degrees as being equivalent to RA degrees. Of course, there are conditions. The person must not have been teaching prior to receiving their DA degree because we know that there are people who teach on the college level based on their Masters degree.

I worry that people misunderstand. I would love to see the day where DETC degrees and RA degrees are seen as being equivalent. But look at hiring practices in professions that require licensure (for example) Can you become a CPA with a DETC degree? (I really don't know but I'm guessing the answer is NO). Can you become a licesensed therapist with a DETC degree? A licensed architect? I've never explored all these fields with an eye toward differentiating DETC degrees from RA degrees but I'm guessing that DETC degrees fall short in the eyes of these professional groups. So we are then to believe that all these people, all these professional organizations don't know what they're doing? They don't know anything about the standards of their professions? If I'm wrong about this I hope that people will point out my mistakes because this is actually one of your best potential arguments for equivalency.

 

I think that historically, schools only accepted credits from schools accredited by the same accreditor that accredited them. (Or another of the regionals in the RA case.) That was a contributing factor in why schools became accredited in the first place. It's only fairly recently that the number of institutional accreditors has started to grow, and now we see universities starting to expand their policies as a result. There's CHEA's HETA initiative for example.

I haven't presented any theories. I just expressed my opinion that Rich's initial double-barrelled attack on DETC as "inferior", as "the little accreditor that couldn't", was overstated. (If all he wanted to say was that DETC credits and degrees are less widely recognized than their RA equivalents, I'd have agreed with him. That's not a particularly new or controversial observation, after all.)

I thought that line of argument was supposed to be a "red herring".

When schools don't accept credits because of the originating school's accreditation (as opposed to class content), is there any evidence that this rejection is DETC-specific? (I've never seen any evidence of that.) Or would the same policy apply to non-RA credits in general?

If we want to argue that these sort of RA-only policies are motivated by RA schools' (supposed) knowledge that schools accredited by non-RA accreditors are academically inferior to themselves, then we will have to address the obvious Rockefeller University and American Museum of Natural History sort of non-RA counterexamples. Clearly the strong dismissal isn't going to be very credible for some non-RA programs and schools. And I think that it probably isn't true for lots of individual classes offered by many non-RA schools. After all, the biggest variable in quality of instruction is going to be the quality of the instructor. And some non-RA classes feature fine teachers.

Now if somebody wants to argue that a disproportionate number of the non-RA schools are clustered at the low end of the academic quality spectrum, I'd agree with that too. Few of them feature selective admissions, vibrant intellectual lives or strong reputations in their fields. (Most RA DL programs don't fit that description either.) Many of the non-RA schools seem to be small proprietorial vocational schools. But having said that, I think that we still need to recognize that there's still going to be quite a bit of instructional quality overlap between them and many RA schools. And that suggests that of the non-RA schools shouldn't just be dismissed with a sneer.

 

Several of them post here occasionally.

My own impression of the Harrison Middleton DA is that its main utility might be as an upgrade degree for community college instructors. I don't think that it would be very competitive as an initial degree for young academic careerists seeking tenure track teaching jobs.

But once again, suppose that we broaden the discussion away from DETC to non-RA degrees in general. Now we have Rockefeller University to consider. It boasts a number of Nobel laureates and its PhD graduates are professors all over the US and the world. So it seems to me that the most significant variable here probably isn't the accreditor, it's a school's (and perhaps more to the point, a department's) reputation in its field. My belief is that if DETC ever acquired a school with a research reputation like Rockefeller's, then the DETC accreditation thing wouldn't be an issue at all.

Architecture licensing boards typically require NAAB accredited degrees. Civil engineering typically wants ABET. The legal profession wants ABA accreditation. Psychology often wants APA. There are countless examples in the health fields. The point is that simply being RA often isn't sufficient. Licensing boards want specialized programmatic accreditation. Usually the schools with the specialized accreditation are also RA, but not universally, there are exceptions. For example, there are stand-alone ABA law schools without any other accreditation. And they are bar-qualifying, while an RA law school that isn't ABA wouldn't be.

 

Similar exceptions actually seem common enough in nursing and allied health. Here are all the Registered Nursing entry programs in California, approved by the state Board of Nursing. Half a dozen are NA. One is unaccredited.

American University of Health Sciences, NA ACICS
CNI College, NA ABHES
Everest College Ontario Campus, NA ACCSC
ITT Technical Institute Breckinridge School of Nursing, NA ACICS
Kaplan College San Diego, NA ACCSC
Shepherd University, unaccredited BPPE, pursuing WASC
Unitek College, NA ACCSC

Shepherd University was established in 1999, so hasn't quite taken a fast track to accreditation so far. Kaplan College has the same ownership as Kaplan University and about the same logo, but isn't at all part of the Kaplan Univeristy and its NCA HLC RA.

Are there DETC cases along these lines? There's physical therapy at University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences, and there was respiratory therapy at California College for Health Sciences, (which is now Independence University, and eventually left the DETC for NA ACCSC as a division of Stevens-Henager College).

 

It is deja vu, the same 5 or 6 people unanimously agreeing with each other and making stuff up to support each other, proclaiming all other views as uninformed, wishful, or belligerent. We all know that the real bias here comes from someone, a long time ago, not getting a job at an 'inferior' school and still holding a grudge because the think they are so 'superior'.. don't worry you are still important in our eyes..!

 

Accepting any accrediting body is acceptable, as long as the candidate fully understands the limited utility of said degrees. However, it's incumbent to refer candidates to degrees (and accreditations) that have the most universal utility.

It's highly unlikely that that's a motive.

 

The weird thing is all of a sudden I am defending something that I am not that fond of...

 

"But once again, suppose that we broaden the discussion away from DETC to non-RA degrees in general. Now we have Rockefeller University to consider. It boasts a number of Nobel laureates and its PhD graduates are professors all over the US and the world. So it seems to me that the most significant variable here probably isn't the accreditor, it's a school's (and perhaps more to the point, a department's) reputation in its field. My belief is that if DETC ever acquired a school with a research reputation like Rockefeller's, then the DETC accreditation thing wouldn't be an issue at all."

Yes, yes, Rockefeller and please mention that test pilot school as well. The fact is that these are exceptions, everyone knows it and you're trying to twist the argument away from it's original point. If you want to say that RA schools gnerally don't accpet DETC credits, not because of the accreditation but because of the school/courses themselves then we are in agreement. But the fact is that curiously, all these schools who are getting their credits rejected are DETC schools. The individuasl schools and their courses are not accepted because they are not seen as being equivalent. Now you can hypothesize that RA schools only like RA schools because it's traditional but that's just speculation on your part. Isn't it more likely that they actually know what they're doing and are not simply stupid slaves to tradition?

 

Which was what?

My purpose of pointing to exceptions was simply to demonstrate that there ARE exceptions. All it takes to disprove the assertion: 'For all American schools, if the school isn't RA, then it's academically inferior', is to point to a single non-RA school that clearly isn't inferior. When those kind of disconfirming instances exist, excessively broad and sweeping generalizations need to be dialed back and further qualified.

And what's more, Rockefeller University was also an answer to your Harrison Middleton objection. You were trying to suggest that DETC doctorates won't cut it for tenure-track academic employment. So I pointed to a non-RA school that's very successful at precisely that, and suggested that if the DETC roster ever includes a school with an academic reputation like Rockefeller's (there's nothing even remotely like it now), that school wouldn't experience much difficulty in placing its graduates either. The fact that the school was DETC accredited rather than RA wouldn't change things a whole lot. The significant variable in placing professors and researchers isn't institutional accreditation, it's academic reputation.

So while you choose to call Rockefeller an "exception", I think that I prefer the phrase "disconfirming instance".

Is there any regional accredited school that singles out DETC and refuses to accept DETC credits specifically? I don't know of any. What many regionally accredited schools have instead is a general policy of only accepting credits from other regionally accredited schools. While that certainly does adversely impact acceptance of DETC credits, it also applies to ACICS credits, ACCSC credits, and to all the rest of them including the NY Regents.

They aren't equivalent in the narrow sense that they didn't originate at a school accredited by a regional accreditor.

I just don't think that it's plausible to think that compared to all RA schools, all non-RA schools have worse class and program syllabi, weaker grading standards and provide inferior instruction. My own experience and that of others I trust tell me that oftentimes that isn't true. I think that there's quite a bit of overlap and that students can sometimes find very good classes and programs at various non-RA schools. While it's obviously important to inform prospective students that non-RA credits and degrees won't be as widely recognized, it's also important not to merely dismiss non-RA schools with overwrought invective or sneering dismissals of the education that they can provide.

 

For another class of exceptions, or disconfirming instances, it probably isn't unheard of for graduates of better non-RA religious schools to go on to teach at likeminded schools that do hold RA.

 

One of the more interesting DETC schools is Catholic Distance University, a non-profit school originally established in 1983 by the Arlington Diocese. CDU seems to be widely accepted and respected in the Catholic community; their degrees and credits are taken seriously by regionally accredited Catholic schools, despite CDU's NA status. For example:

Mount St. Mary's is RA, and it is ranked at about the same level as many state universities in the mid-Atlantic area.

If a DETC school develops a strong reputation in a particular field (which is the case for CDU in Catholic studies), then its degrees and credits are likely to get recognition and acceptance from RA schools in that field -- regardless of accreditation differences. The problem is that few DETC schools currently have a reputation of that sort.

 

And another person making up a bunch of generalities to support his unsupportable position.

You've been asked to provide some support for your claim of bias. (Claiming bias is a particularly heinous and insulting behavior if it is not supported. It's tantamount to calling someone immoral and a liar.

Who didn't get what job when? You know, the you claim "we all know" about. How about starting there?

 

I don't know who's overwrought or sneering, I just think that the preponderance of the evidence strongly indicates that non-RA schools simply don't prepare their students as well as RA schools do. Are there exceptions? Of course. There are exceptions on the organizational level and on the student level also. We know that over these last few years the number of RA schools accepting some DETC school's credits has increased and I think that this has been applauded almost universally. The general interpretation of this is that those schools have raised their standards and this is being recognized by some RA schools. Clearly others remain unconvinced at this time. The people who do this for a living largely disagree with you. While I will be happy to see the trend of acceptance continue I am happy to leave them to their work and not try to second guess university policy makers and admissions committees when I (and you) don't have the information necessary to make informed decisions.