Not a serious question, but apparently Redditors have no clue: https://www.reddit.com/r/academia/comments/12vhm73/becoming_a_professor_with_a_possible_red_flag/ While they correctly note that a TT professorship is not going to be based on industry experience, multiple mentions of other school are laughably inaccurate: GCU and WGU are both nonprofit. None of GCU, UP or WGU are diploma mills. Most of Liberty's programs have whichever additional programmatic accreditation is possible (CACREP, CCNE, ACBSP, etc.) All 6 schools mentioned are RA. Of course, they wouldn't believe me if I tried to correct the record anyway.
The term "diploma mill" gets tossed around rather loosely. That does not seem to have changed over the years. As John Bear once wrote, "one man's diploma mill is another man's alternative university." My experience has been that people who say these things often do not hold advanced degrees. Just as bad: insisting there is a difference between the terms "diploma mill" and "degree mill." They mean the same thing. Whatever distinctions might be artificially constructed do not add up to an actual difference. On The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon often bags on Leonard for having graduated from Princeton. (Sheldon is a graduate of Cal Tech, where they both work.) In the real world, those to schools are ranked right next to each other (#6 and #7). Back in the 1980's, I was chatting with a government official who said she was interested in pursuing a doctorate. Back then, DL options for a doctorate were few. When I explained the school I was attending for my doctorate, she told me that would never do; if she couldn't get her degree from a top-flight university she wouldn't do it at all. This was a convenient dodge, of course, since she wasn't going to leave her career to go back to school. The artificial snobbery was dumb. In 1984, I was waiting to speak with the civilian head of training at the base where I was stationed. As I waited, one of his co-workers made a crack about his "diploma mill degree" and his title of "doctor." I was curious, then I saw the diploma: a PhD from the Union for Experimenting Colleges and Universities. Union was a candidate for regional accreditation at the time, and could not reasonably called a diploma mill, but there you go. When I was at Leicester, it was made clear that your doctoral advisor could come from another school, but not a "post-1992" ("new") university. It is interesting the distinctions people make.
What is a diploma mill? Simple - any college or university that I perceive to be of lesser quality than those I attended.
