West Clayton University

Because:

• A degree isn't a quid pro quo for a salary
• A degree isn't a job-related achievement (it is a career-related achievement) unless it is a mandatory requirement
• People should be paid for their performance
• A degree is a proxy that says something positive about an employee's capabilities, but (again) performance is what matters

 

This forum is about getting legitimate and properly accredited degrees. To put it simply, West Clayton falls under neither of those.

 

I love that I get to be part of a forum with such a long history that there are posts from 12 years ago.

 

12 years - heck! I can look back at my OWN posts here, years older than that. Tonight I was looking up posts from 20+ years ago. Man, this is the stuff of history! Or maybe I just need to get a life...

 

I am afraid that more than one employer would say something along: Yeah, that guy takes shortcuts and does whatever it takes to reach his goal. That's the sort of spirit we need in this dog-eat-dog-society, ethics be damned!!

 

Indeed. This is a corollary of the idea that education is not job training. Fake doctors don't provide good medical advice because they skipped the apprenticeship of learning medicine. Fake bachelor's degree-in-History holders can still be decent claims adjusters, because they don't need to use any of their history education on the job. (Unless James Salamites hits another Presidential motorcade.)

Edit:

https://comb.io/WMDKps

 

After a quick search, the oldest post I could find on this forum was February 2001. https://www.degreeinfo.com/index.php?threads/cool-program-of-the-moment-university-of-north-dakota-online-m-s-in-space-studies.4/

About that same time I notice there was a thread about a.e.d.. IIRC, I think it stood for alt.education.distance. That was the Usenet group discussion board that preceded this forum. For those that don't know, Usenet was the original implementation of the Ethernet. I think it used the Ethernet like the world wide web but the only thing on there was discussion groups. It was all dial up though. You would access from a phone modem.

 

In AED days, I accessed it a few times from an Internet parlour. Maybe around 1996-7. I remember making exactly ONE post. It was about a degree mill that was operating a mail-drop two blocks from my old home in England - "Palmers Green University," part of the UDP (University Diploma Program) scam, that involved 30-odd fake "schools," shady people in Cyprus, Romania, Israel -- and a Rabbi-turned-crook in Boston.

Some of those people on AED were raving kooks. Others were early adopters, getting their feet wet in DL and offshore degrees. A handful of kooks and quite a few 'pioneers' migrated to DI.

And Bill, I think the earliest posts on DI would be 2001.

 

Sorry. UDP = University Degree Program, not "Diploma." Timer again.

 

Yes, a.e.d. was completely unmoderated. Blatant diploma mill frauds would advertise their bogus degrees in plain sight. Of course there were many here that would point out the sketchy degrees. A big part of the problem though was that distance education was still in its infancy and accredited schools wouldn't offer distance learning degrees.

 

Usenet, yes. I believe ethernet has another meaning. (Hard-wired, closed-system cable network using Cat-5 cable, IIRC.) I don't believe the two are related.

I was a denizen on a.e.d., moving over here to enjoy the slightly-more-than-no moderation.

About.com also had a board, but the moderator they selected was clueless and just used it for self-promotion. It died.

So did about.com. Not sure how such a great url dies, but it now re-directs to something sorta related (dotdash). Apparently, the NY Times bought about.com and, of course, killed it. There's a Wikipedia page on it, but it's about as boring as they get.

 

Agreed. And I didn't mean to imply it as being synonymous. To clarify where I probably got the word "legitimate" from, in relation to accreditation, may very well come from this quote I read many years ago and happened to find again (just to satisfy my own curiosity):

"Still, authentic accreditation is the only widespread system of school evaluation that we have. A school's accreditation status can be helpful to the potential student in this way: while there are a few good schools that are not accredited, it is very unlikely that any very bad or illegal school is authentically accredited....In other words, authentic accreditation is a pretty good sign that a given school is legitimate, and serves as a "lowest common denominator" guarantee of some level of quality assurance". (John Bear--Bears Guide To Earning Degrees By Distance Learning 15th Edition)

And as far as credibility goes amongst the site and its posters, I think that Dr. Bear stated then, what is true to present day, when he said:

"Tens of thousands of messages on the DegreeInfo news forum deal with every aspect of earning degrees, and many other higher education topics. Every day, there are large numbers of new postings, with questions, answers, and opinions (sometimes informational, sometimes outrageous, often both)".