Nice, completely straight-faced account of the University of Northern Virginia.
The school offers bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees, though it’s not clear how that works since it is unaccredited…
[Just-resigned] Chancellor David V. Lee felt like there was just too much chatter about his profile on the world’s largest bondage and sado-masochism website, collarme.com.
Background here.
Admission to the Pirogov med school in Moscow has always been pretty straightforward: You give the head of the school thousands of rubles, and he lets you in.
The Russian government figured it had gotten around this system by instituting a standardized exam, and mandating that the university admit the highest scorers.
The head of the school sat down and scratched his head and came up with a solution.
Announce you’ve admitted a class of high scorers. Then a few weeks later announce that none of the high scorers has chosen to attend Pirogov, so you’ve admitted instead the traditional cohort.
Would have worked, too, except for some damn blogger who figured out the scheme.
Todd Nelson heads for-profit colleges. As head of the University of Phoenix, he “signed a $9.8 million settlement with the Department of Education, which had found that Phoenix had ‘systematically and intentionally’ violated federal rules against paying recruiters for students.”
Competitor Education Management Corporation snapped Nelson right up, and now he’s overseeing a similar federal and state lawsuit which, one amazed observer notes, “spans the entire company — from the ground level in over 100 separate institutions up to the most senior management — and accounts for nearly all the revenues the company has realized since 2003.” The suit wants $11 billion in state and federal financial aid back from Nelson’s ed biz. Wow.
What’s next for this financial genius? He led Phoenix through a loss of almost ten million dollars; Education Management will certainly settle for around… let’s say one billion. Time to jump to Kaplan, where he can maybe work his magic on even bigger numbers.
First on the west coast, and now on the east, the feds are fucking up the perfect entrepreneurial synergy of cutting edge educational technology and a vast sellers’ market.
Unaccredited for-profit universities take in tons of foreign students, give them a visa, set up bogus online courses for them, and send them on their merry way hither and yon throughout these vast United States.
Yes – it’s yet another in the long list of distance ed’s advantages over inconvenient old-fashioned face to face university teaching: You can come over here from, say, India, grab your visa documentation at the office park with I’m a University scrawled on a piece of paper in Tower B, Suite 630 East, and then get to the job in Akron you were going to in the first place! Does any other technology allow you to do this? No – only online.
Naturally the feds are on to this, so they’ve got this rule:
[F]oreign students must be physically present on campus and can take no more than a single course per semester online.
But how rule-bound, in general, are these institutions? (Some in Congress want the government to come up with a “list of warning signs for colleges breaking visa rule[s].” Based on the Tri-Valley University story, UD proposes this handy rule of thumb: If the university president’s private residence is larger than the entire campus, consider this a warning sign.) Can we trust them to follow this online rule?
Well, let’s look at how they’re doing in terms of accreditation rules. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on Northern Virginia University:
[UNV is accredited by the] American University Accreditation Council, which is not recognized by the Department of Education. The address listed as the council’s headquarters is an auto-body repair shop owned by the chairman of Northern Virginia’s board. A caller to the number listed on the accreditor’s Web site was greeted with the following message Thursday evening: “This is D’Angelo, so get at me back.”
Yes, the flourishing visa mills of America are getting at us back.
UD didn’t think Chicago State University, with its long history of negligence, corruption, and graduation rates barely above ten percent, had any more surprises in store for her (she’s chronicled its disgraceful ways for years on this blog), but now there’s this:
Chicago State has a policy that students with a grade-point average below 1.8 will be dismissed “for poor scholarship,” but records obtained by [the Chicago Tribune] show students were allowed to continue registering for classes with GPAs as low as zero. Meanwhile, President Wayne Watson was touting increased retention and graduation rates as evidence that the institution was improving after years marked by widespread financial mismanagement, scathing audits and a failure to graduate students.
Chicago State is what UD calls a Potemkin university. It exists almost entirely as a group of administrators collecting state and federal government money. As a kind of bonus, it ruins its students’ lives.
… journalism is a distinction Christopher Hitchens introduces (new one on me, at least) in a recent post about Rupert Murdoch; but the distinction also works in ranking bottom-feeder universities. Gutter would be for-profit online tax siphons; sewer would be their kissing cousins, the diploma mills.
For those, like UD, who enjoy the spectacle of a real shitstorm, there’s this story out of Kentucky:
A Louisville-based ministry and a large Arizona church are suing each other over the disputed sale of an unaccredited online university last year, each accusing the other of fraud.
Child of the King Ministries of Louisville agreed to sell an entity called American International University for $400,000 to the Phoenix-based Church for the Nations in May 2010, both lawsuits say.
Okay, so straightforward sale of a diploma mill from one house of God to another… Happens every day… Only Church for the Nations is so dumb it thought a diploma mill… I dunno… was something… had assets or something rather than just being a website that sold pieces of paper…
The church’s lawsuit said the [diploma mill owner church] claimed the university had numerous accreditations, affiliations with other schools and a regular cash flow of between $15,000 and $30,000 from foreign students who wanted a credential from an American institution.
That church… Ah say that church didn’t get the no honor among thieves memo…
The founder [of Korea’s Myungshin University] is the president, and his wife, a daughter and a son were employed as chairwoman of the board, president and vice president, respectively.
… returns to haunt the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Communications in Trinidad.
… and who can be surprised that they crop up in Michele Bachmann’s business?
[Marcus Bachmann’s] Ph.D. comes from the Union Institute, a Cincinnati-based correspondence school; in 2002, it was cited by the Ohio Board of Regents, which said, “Expectations for student scholarship at the doctoral level were not as rigorous as is common for doctoral work.”
As Politico has reported, he’s not licensed with any of the boards that certify mental-health professionals in Minnesota, one of the few states that allows unlicensed people to practice mental-health care. [Another therapist on staff has an M.A. that] comes from Argosy University, a for-profit diploma mill.
Answer: Hyuk! It don’t! It’s Tennessee!
There’s a kind of moral hierarchy when it comes to the legitimacy of your university’s advanced degrees.
At the very top you find degrees conferred by professors who have themselves earned advanced degrees as result of doing first-rate work at excellent universities. These professors have read your thesis.
This is the model that prevails, with exceptions, in the United States of America. Most of our professors graduated from legitimate schools; most take seriously the job of reading, critiquing, and grading theses. Sometimes they send theses back for revision before passing them. Sometimes they fail them.
Below this high point lie countries like Germany, where no doubt legit professors are too busy or important or whatever to read some of the theses they pass. Hence the big, ongoing scandal of German politicians found to have plagiarized their dissertations. (One of them seems to have earned a sabbatical.)
A notch further down is today’s news story: The Czech Republic.
The law faculty of the University of West Bohemia (ZČU) in Plzeň has made headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons — accused of acting like a diploma mill for Czech politicians and entrepreneurs looking to advance their careers (or massage their egos) by obtaining academic titles without actually attending classes or doing any original research. Now, its recognition of degrees from Ukraine is drawing fire from the Supreme Prosecution Service (NSZ).
NSZ chief Pavel Zeman has revealed that the courts have annulled 25 decisions by the university to recognize degrees from the Carpathian State University of Ukraine…
Here you have a systemic practice of handing out (actually, probably selling) degrees to anyone who shows up.
Shocked by all of this naughtiness, the education ministry has been checking the status of “more than 315,000 people who graduated from Czech intuitions [sic].”
Somewhere way below this is Italy, with its nattering nabobs of nepotism.
When you get to the very bottom, you hit Pakistan, whose entire political class seems to have purchased their degrees from diploma mills.
… mischief only.
A local reporter demonstrates that a particular high school is a diploma mill. Miami Dade College accepts their graduates and will, it informs the reporter, continue to do so.
But my wife’s school is, and if you give me another $7,000 dollars, I’ll arrange a transfer.