When schools lose their minds....

Good to see a school with steady growth and a sound financial footing has decided to absolutely lose their minds.

Horrible new name -Check!
Expensive unneeded accreditation that no one wants or needs- Check!
Adding insane none mission related degrees-Check!

They were 100% fine and on sound footing with deac, this is a huge burden that is purely for vanity of the administration. They could have added more degrees etc under deac with little burden.

"the university will offer a new degree that focuses on artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and big data design"
I could see getting HLC (kind of) but the added burden of ATS? They had to have really added a lot of staff to get that.

 

You must be talking about Catholic International University, formerly Catholic Distance University.

But their graduate school of theology was accredited by ATS in 2020, well before the university was accredited by HLC in 2022.

ATS wasn't so much an added burden as a closely related project pursued at a partly overlapping time, but completed first. And the ATS accreditation was certainly noticed by and probably reassuring to HLC.

 

Horrible new name -Check! Been there,

The Regents External Degree Program (REX) 1971.
Regents College 1984-2000.
Excelsior College 2001-2022.
Excelsior University 2022-Present.

 

Yes I am. I guess the name got cut off in the title by some error of mine.

I wonder how many people will be signing up here for AI courses?

Yeah they needed neither ATS or HLC for any reason. 99% of students are directly from parishes lay leader education. This is merely vanity from staff. Neither of these serve any purpose. They are run out of a nice but small building, have close to a thousand students, and charge with fees almost $1500 a class undergrad. Students have to attend this school in most cases because it is where they are told they have to attend. Forcing to them to take on massive student loan debt (or pay it out of pocket I guess?)