Unaccredited schools- all degree mills??

[Virtual Bison]

I take issue with several points here:

"Successful" is a relative term that you have not defined, but being shut or kicked out by four state governments might not be on the criteria list.

It has been documented in a number of places that Kennedy-Western, a for profit school did make a great deal of money. It graduated 30,000 students. I suppose "successful" is a subjective but in my humble opinion Kennedy had a pretty good run.

I suppose that is why Dr. John Bear recommended the school until he changed his mind and sold down the river all the students he sent there.

What's the basis for this statement? The accreditors had nothing to do with it. California, Hawaii, Idaho, and Wyoming each sent it packing. The DETC turned it down (if you can't make the cut at DETC....), but that didn't shut down the school.

If you want to be precise it was the University shareholders who closed it down. I would guess that they could have moved the school to another location. But maybe they decided that it would not be worth the expense.

I do think that the school was a victim of its own success. It became the big fish that the accreditation racket wanted to make an example of simply because they were attracting so many students and making so much money in the process. This is why a campaign of defamation was launched against the school. This did, in turn lead to the DETC pulling the plug.

Kennedy-Western was established in 1982 under California's very lax Authorized category. It never got its programs Approved. When California eliminated its Authorized category, Kennedy-Western went license shopping to each of those other states, all the while continuing to operate from Southern California. It could have--theoretically--gotten state approval and continued to operate without bothering with DETC. But its academic performance was so bad as to not even be able to rise above that low bar.

That last sentence is your own opinion. What I do know is that for a long time Kennedy Western did have many programs which were not offered elsewhere. For example, it was the first school to have an online Engineering program. They actually preceeded DeVry and Walden in that respect. Before Kennedy-Western, DeVry only offereed Engineering Technology programs. Later Walden launced a program and later DeVry followed suite.

Unaccredited schools that run into trouble invariably do so with their state agencies, not with accrediting agencies. In fact, accredited schools are the ones who fear the accreditors. There are many examples of unaccredited schools operating for decades without a sniff from accrediting agencies. In fact, it was DETC's really low standards that changed the dynamic, giving operations like SCUPS, AJU, and CCU a chance at redemption, which they took. Kennedy-Western tried the same thing, but failed.

It is specifically the state agencies which I am referring to here. All you need do is look at the posts on this board regarding Alan Contreras, whose heavy handed attempts to enforce academic conformity led to him being convicted of civil rights violations. Or also consider the case of George Gollin whose attempts to destroy the careers and reputations of people led to a lawsuit from a perfectly legitimate University which he had defamed. He had used the resourses of a public University to further his own self promotion at the expense of others.

Its a fact that many states are attempting to criminalize unaccredited degrees and those who hold them. I do know of one state, specifically Oregon which passed a law forbidding degree holders from using their creditials, which would actually be a violation of first ammendment rights to free speech. KWU students sued the state and got the state to change its law. Other states have attempted similar laws but these are proving to be comepletly unenforcable since, besides being unconsititutional, they overstep the rights of corporations to hire as they see fit.

Anecdotes--unsupported by any evidence and riddled with undefined terms--are fine for conversation, but they prove very little. And even if we accept them at face value and give them weight, what of it? Here's the paradox: you're proving the opposite point. After all, if becoming accredited is no big deal and allows such poor examples of schools, what does that say about the schools that can't even make that low standard? If, as you say, Charter Oak (a state college) is "not all that great," what does it say about the schools in your post?

Again... politics!


More than anything else I am speaking out for the students, who are the real victims here. This attempt to cast students of unaccredited schools as being lazy, unintellegent or even as miscreants is really doing them an injustice. There are several "schools" which are rightfully called Diploma Mills. These are not schools so much as they are businesses which sell degrees which require no work. I have seen such operations advertised. Of course its dishonest for both the owners and purchasers of such degrees. But this is not what I am talking about here.