PAULH
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Posts: 4672
Location: Western Japan
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 Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 12:53 am Post subject: Re: Ever heard of this "University" |
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| tsneds01 wrote: |
| http://www.westonreserve.org/index.htm |
Its a diploma mill degree.
A degree from the Seychelles? Give me a break.
July 07, 2005
How to Tell the Value of a Degree from the School's Webpage - A DIY Guide
Almost daily, it seems, I receive mails from people asking for my help in deciding whether or not the degree offered by a school is valuable. As you can imagine, the number of organizations offering bogus degrees is endless, so I can't possibly research all of them myself. In this post, I will explain how you can examine the web page of an organization and tell if it is offers degrees that will be valuable to use for finding a job or continuing further with your education. Bear in mind that the method I am going to describe is a rough procedure. There could be a very small number of meaningful degrees offered by schools that fall outside the criteria I will describe here. I have never seen one, in spite of repeated claims by readers that they know of one or received a degree from one.
Check if the school is accredited and who accredits it.
Accreditation means that the school has been inspected by an independent body and found to meet certain standards. While these standards often have nothing to do with educational quality, schools that have not been examined can not help their students obtain financial assistance. Subsequently, any school that competes for top students must have accreditation from a major accreditation body. As such, I have adopted the term "meaningful" to describe accreditation that will allow you to obtain government-sponsored financial assistance when attending the school.
You can find out if a school has accreditation by examining their web page. Often schools will have a link to the page that details accreditation information on their Home Page. If you can't find this, go to Google and type the name of the school in quotation marks ("XXX University") and then the word accreditation.
Some bogus schools have established their own accreditation bodies. The number of meaningful accreditation bodies is very small. To determine whether an accreditation body is meaningful, check their web page. Every meaningful accreditation body will have a web page. This page will list the member schools. Read them all. If you do not recognize the name of any of the schools, this is a sign that the accreditation is probably valueless.
For an example of an organization whose accreditation is meaningless, have a look here.
Does the web page look like a real university's web page?
Many of the bogus degree providers whose web pages I have looked at don't spend a lot of time developing their web sites, as a result, key information is missing. Can you find the names of faculty? Do they list courses you can take? Have a look at a legitimate school's web page and see what kind of information they list, then look at the web site in question. Does it provide the same information? If not, there better be a good reason.
Does the school have a business address?
One of the amazing things I have found is that many of the schools in question have no address. That's right; they run a university out of a post office box or something like that. Rochville University, for example, has no business address. From what I have been told, you send your money to a post office box address and they send you a diploma. Any school that claims they can operate without a physical location anywhere in the world can not be legitimate.
Another problem is schools whose business office is located outside of a modern developed nation. I know this sound discriminatory, but it is the reality of this problem. Many countries have very lax laws dealing with the establishment of educational organizations. St Clements University, for example, is located in the Turks and Caicos Islands of the British West Indies. If they are making the claim that their degrees are legitimate and meaningful internationally, yet they run their business in a location that is clearly not among the most modern, developed nations, this is a warning sign that the school probably lacks some essential characteristic to do business in the most advanced nations.
There are a large number of other telltale signs that I could list, but these points are major indicators of problems. If you'd like to see a detailed examination of a number of meaningless educational organizations describing these characteristics, take a look at this post.
If you are wondering about a school, but it appears to have a very small web site without key information, it lists no physical location in a developed nation, and it is accredited by an organization whose members you have never heard of, it is almost certainly a meaningless degree. |
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