Who is on "our" side?

[Geoff Vankirk]

Most DE schools are scams. Look at the University of Phoenix, for example. They operate on a short paper curriculum. For each class one must write a one page short paper. It doesn't matter how much you learn, or if you only spent a few minutes flipping through the basic concepts. UoP just wants the students to write a short paper, which is entirely objective, so they can pass them through and go on to pretend that thy have a curriculum.

Any school who wants you to do work without studying for it is just out to take your money. A real school would be interested in teaching and offering learning opportunities.

With some of these schools (regionally accredited) you can learn more on a family hiking trip than with their entire test/write-out-of-school scam program.

There is an easy solution to what you perceive to be deficiencies at such DE schools. Don't attend UoP or Kaplan or DeVry or whatever school you think sucks. If you own a business then don't hire an employee who has a degree from such a school. If you are looking for a house and you know that one of your prospective neighbors has such a degree, move somewhere else. Problem solved.

RA schools have done more harm to education than diploma mills will ever do. They've made the entire idea of higher education questionable. That's why no one can pin down what a diploma mill is or is not - because these so called "real" schools are capitalizing on the same thing. Going to school isn't about learning anymore.

They do the same thing at the High School level. Don't want to go to High School? Just walk over to your nearest adult education facility and "Test Out" with the GED.

So what should be done about it? Nothing. People just need to realize that all colleges and universities are nothing more than CORPORATIONS out to make a buck. The entire concept of higher education is a scam. There are no "standards" in quality.

A degree is only a piece of paper. Like money and religion, its value is in the eye of the beholder.

U.S. Regional Accreditation is not the be-all and end-all of the higher education world, nor is it the final word on a school's legitimacy. It is unfortunate that a number of people have somehow said it so long and so loudly that many people believe it to be so. On the other hand, RA does signify some minimum standard that the school has attained. Let's call a spade a spade, while there is some grey area, diploma mills don't attempt to provide any coursework. They often take a similar sounding name to a legitimate school, or they obscure their true ownership, or they try some phony, foreign bullshit scam like Sorbon(e) and the VAE and try to capitalize on an ill-informed public in the English-speaking world.