Will there be a day where DETC and RA credits are universally accepted?

That day may indeed come, but even if it does, it probably will be no time soon.

 

Sometimes DETC schools do become RA. American Military University was a DETC school that became RA (and then dropped the old DETC accreditation). California Southern University is currently DETC, but recently applied for RA.

But going RA means a higher level of scrutiny, more standards to meet, and greater expense -- and these factors typically mean higher tuition costs. It's quite possible that Penn Foster or CIE could achieve RA if they really wanted to -- but it's also likely that they would have to increase their tuition if they did. If their students are price-sensitive, then going RA might not pay off: the higher tuition might drive away more students than the added prestige would bring in. And since most DETC schools are for-profit businesses, academic prestige is not the primary consideration.

You could simply ask Penn Foster or CIE about the RA option. But if you do, they will probably tell you: "We aren't RA because we want to keep tuition as affordable as possible."

 

I have to ask you guys something about CIE because I am so impressed by the depth of their Electronics engineering technology AAS program. Its 106 credit hours, isn't a typical AS degree 60 or so credits? So what's the difference here? And a typical BS is 120 or so credits, well you are almost there with 106 credits. Do we know of graduates that may have come on here with this degree and have had great paying careers? There is something about that school that I keep checking them out.

 

According to The National Center of Education Statistics (1968, p.15): "Credit hour. The unit by which an institution may measure its course work. The number of credit hours assigned to a course is usually defined by the number of hours per week in class and the number of weeks in the session."

So, considering the depth and difficulty of an electronics engineering program, a higher level of contact time with your course/instructors makes sense to translate to a higher amount of credit hours... at least that's the way I interpret it anyway.

 

Just a guess but I think you may be looking at 106 Quarter Hour credits vs 60+ Semester Hour credits for an associate degree.

 

At the very bottom of the AAS degree it says 254 lessons, 106 credit hours. Link: Associate in Applied Science in Electronic Engineering Technology Very bottom, 254 lessons [106 credit hours].

 

Although this regularly occurring topic on Degreeinfo tends to focus upon the DETC (given the nature of this forum), it is really about the mess that U.S. higher education has become as a result of campus politics, turf wars and the desire of government leaders to instigate short-term fixes that produce long-term problems.

U.S. accreditation is needlessly complex. The DETC versus regional accreditation is really about national accrediting agencies that are authorized to accredit entire institutions, as opposed to national programmatic accrediting agencies that accredit a single program or discipline. RA vs. NA spawns a seemingly endless amount of Degreeinfo forums.

The D.B.A. and Ed.D. degrees exist because of a turf war at Harvard between the College of Arts & Sciences and the Schools of Business and Education. Now we are stuck with ill-defined degrees that vary by institution.

ACICS existed to legitimize trade and technical programs that provided certification for professions that did not require academic degrees. DETC existed to legitimize correspondence education programs. Regional accreditation was developed as a way to handle academic degrees. When ACICS and DETC were allowed into the academic degree business, offering the same degrees as those institutions accredited regionally, a mess was created. The U.S. Dept. of Education now authorizes the DETC to accredited institutions that offer virtually any doctorate other than the Ph.D., including degrees that the Dept. of Ed. declares to be equivalent to the Ph.D.

The Dept. of Ed. creates this problem and then does nothing to address the confusion caused by its own inconsistency. Creating this two-tiered institutional accreditation system seems to me to be as silly as creating multiple equivalent degrees with no clearly defined and consistent difference between them.

 

In the past there were few RA DL universities.
Today almost all RA Universities have some DL to full 100% DL programs.
I don't see much difference between UoP RA to CCU DETC accredited degree. Yet UoP is RA so it may have higher utility.

I think there are many Universities that don't accept RA credit in to RA schools.
The classes have to match.

We leaned the hard way when National University RA didn't accept Cal State Long Beach credit for the same program for my wife when she was doing her teaching credential when we lived in S Cal then.

She then went to earn NU Masters degree in Psychology.

 

Of course, if you're going to that type of career school that's separate from the degree-granting school, you already know going in that you're in it for a diploma or certificate and not a degree.

 

In Wisconsin, most of the career fields that require certification or licensure (i.e. teaching, counseling, nursing) require degrees from "regionally accredited" schools, which limits the utility to NA degrees in certain fields. However, if someone has a business degree, such as a B.S. in Management or Business Administration, it probably wouldn't matter to employers where the degree is from, as long as it is legitimately accredited.

 

The best thing to do is to find RA schools that accept NA credits and/or degrees. For instance, you could earn between 70-90 credits through a NA school and transfer them to Upper Iowa University, Ottawa University, University of Wisconsin-Platteville (excuse spelling error), or University of Phoenix, which I believe accept NA credits; then, complete your degree from a regionally accredited school.