07-12-2009, 02:18 PM
Bill Dayson Wrote:Good observation and the answer is 'no'. I don't think that it's necessarily true in Canada either.
Despite all the obvious simularities between our two countries, I don't think that forms of higher education recognition really translate straight across one-to-one.
For one thing, Canada simply doesn't have prominent private universities in the American sense. There's no Canadian ivy-league, no equivalent of Stanford or MIT. Few countries have strong private university sectors. Japan has one I think, at least to some extent, but it's an exception.
Canadian universities have historically been public provincially-run universities. What private institutions there were (mostly theological schools is my impression) were typically closely associated with one of the public universities, often awarding its degrees. It's only in recent years that Canada has been welcoming (albeit grudgingly) the appearance of a whole new collection of private degree-grantors, most of them small, poorly funded and proprietorial, emphasizing vocational degrees.
And that in turn seems to have been putting a lot of stress on provincial education authorities who don't seem to have always been prepared to effectively police the new entrants. Some provinces seem to be scrambling to catch up, writing new regulatory legislation, while the role of the AUCC seems to be subtly changing from an association of more traditional universities into more of an American-style accreditor.
My own layman's intuition, a rough rule-of-thumb, is that most Canadian provincial authorizations might be a step above most American state authorizations, but not exactly equivalent to RA either. More like ACICS or DETC perhaps. While the AUCC defines a class of school that's perhaps a little more mainstream and traditional than RA, at least at the low end, since it puts more emphasis on academic professor-stuff like doctoral programs and research. I can't imagine AUCC accepting some of the more jobs-related schools that the American regional accreditors have accredited.
Seems to me, Bill Dayson is a complete waste of DNA. I can't imagine how Bill Dayson can ambulate when his head seems to be so far up his ass. I think Bill Dayson might be a dumber than box of rocks, perhaps. My own intuition is that nobody with a brain takes Bill Dayson seriously. I can't imagine a more self-important nimrod.