Don't Stay in School
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
I know I'm asking for it by asking this, but here goes.
Scott is that American's getting PhDs from those schools or non-American's just buying PhDs? And what kind of PhDs?
What's the difference? If American universities sell PhD's, it's American education that sets the low bar for itself. The quality of education is only as high as the lowest bar that they certify for that education.
No idea what kind of PhD, any I'm sure.
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I love how you always generalize and insinuate that the entire system is shit, simply because of your hatred of the education system.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
I know I'm asking for it by asking this, but here goes.
Scott is that American's getting PhDs from those schools or non-American's just buying PhDs? And what kind of PhDs?
What's the difference? If American universities sell PhD's, it's American education that sets the low bar for itself. The quality of education is only as high as the lowest bar that they certify for that education.
No idea what kind of PhD, any I'm sure.
While I agree that the low bar is bad for the sake of being bad - but I also wonder is it Europeans/Middle Easterns, etc that are bribing their way to PhDs (something of course that the universities shouldn't be allowing), but that those non Americans are even asking for - asking to bribe their way instead of earning it.
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@JaredBusch said in Don't Stay in School:
I love how you always generalize and insinuate that the entire system is shit, simply because of your hatred of the education system.
How did I generalize? The university's reputational value is based on what it values its degrees at. If person X can just buy a degree, the degree represents zero value. If someone else gets that degree, no matter what they did to get it, the value of the degree itself remains zero. The degree doesn't represent any learning or standards.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@JaredBusch said in Don't Stay in School:
I love how you always generalize and insinuate that the entire system is shit, simply because of your hatred of the education system.
How did I generalize? The university's reputational value is based on what it values its degrees at. If person X can just buy a degree, the degree represents zero value. If someone else gets that degree, no matter what they did to get it, the value of the degree itself remains zero. The degree doesn't represent any learning or standards.
The entire statement is a generalization against all university PhDs. If you wish to call out specific instances and provide proof, feel free. Otherwise you are mindlessly spewing shit that should not be paid attention to by rational, thinking people.
My personal opinion of the education system does not even matter in this case.
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@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@Dashrender said in Don't Stay in School:
I know I'm asking for it by asking this, but here goes.
Scott is that American's getting PhDs from those schools or non-American's just buying PhDs? And what kind of PhDs?
What's the difference? If American universities sell PhD's, it's American education that sets the low bar for itself. The quality of education is only as high as the lowest bar that they certify for that education.
No idea what kind of PhD, any I'm sure.
While I agree that the low bar is bad for the sake of being bad - but I also wonder is it Europeans/Middle Easterns, etc that are bribing their way to PhDs (something of course that the universities shouldn't be allowing), but that those non Americans are even asking for - asking to bribe their way instead of earning it.
Not sure what you mean. The universities commonly sell degrees (one Ivy League was well known for this and Garrison Keillor even wrote about it in one of his books), that it is mostly American or non-Americans taking advantage of the US' lack of oversight on degree programs ... I just don't understand what point you are trying to make. All that matters, as far as I can see it, is that the universities have sold their integrity out, sold the value of their degrees, for a one time injection of money.
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@JaredBusch said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
@JaredBusch said in Don't Stay in School:
I love how you always generalize and insinuate that the entire system is shit, simply because of your hatred of the education system.
How did I generalize? The university's reputational value is based on what it values its degrees at. If person X can just buy a degree, the degree represents zero value. If someone else gets that degree, no matter what they did to get it, the value of the degree itself remains zero. The degree doesn't represent any learning or standards.
The entire statement is a generalization against all university PhDs. If you wish to call out specific instances and provide proof, feel free. Otherwise you are mindlessly spewing shit that should not be paid attention to by rational, thinking people.
My personal opinion of the education system does not even matter in this case.
The point is that the US oversight isn't checking up. Proof you can see from the quality of graduates, of course, nothing else is really proof. Universities can claim that life experience or whatever is enough... since there is no standard, proof doesn't exist. But what we do know, and what actually matters, is that the university system in the US has gained a reputation for doing this. The quality of the education, of course, shows this and I've seen it first hand - major US universities graduating people who don't even begin to know the material and shouldn't have even been in a college classroom let alone getting high end graduate degrees. But what really matters is that the reputation for it is there. Whether someone 100% buys a degree or just pays big money and sits through a class and isn't requires to be to any reasonable standard doesn't matter - the degree's value is based on reputation. So the pudding is the proverbial proof.
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I'm not saying that all universities, or even most, participate in degree selling (although one could argue that any lowering of standards is a form of this) but what is important is that if any accredited university(ies) do this, it lowers the bar for the system. It's the US accreditation process that loses its reputation.
That's why this is so significant and why "generalization" complaints don't apply. It's a single country's oversight, a single accreditation system - if anyone does it, the bar is lowered. To the outside world, even to the inside world, the value is that of the lowest option. It's not generalization. It's just market economics.
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The reason for this, of course, is that if you use degrees to show value then it's the degree itself that must carry that value. If you know (or just suspect) that a degree carries no academic rigour and can simply be a purchased piece of paper, the degree conveys no value. That someone might have worked hard for the degree is irrelevant because there is a reasonable possibility that they did no work at all.
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The only way to know if someone didn't "buy" a degree is to test them. If we test them, we've decided that the degree is worthless already and what matters is the test. So why even look for the degree in the first place if we have a test to determine if they know what we want them to know? Again, the degree drops to zero value.
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In IT we know this process well because of the infamous certification boot camp issues of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, certifications carried a lot of value. They were hard to obtain and there was very little possibility that someone had cheated or whatever.
By the early 2000s, braindumps of test answers and schools teaching basically nothing but test answers had become so common place that it wasn't just remotely possible, it was very reasonably possible that people had done this and, I'm pretty sure, at one point it was even very likely that someone had. Most of us had a lot of experience dealing with boot camp and brain dump certed people - they were useless and the IT field suffered heavily from this happening.
That's all that is going on here - the same processes going on in the universities. The mechanisms are a little different, but the basics are the same.... the old "assumed rigour" that gave degrees their assumed value is now unlikely enough to have happened that people are increasingly uncertain as to whether a degree conveys any meaning that we can trust.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
In IT we know this process well because of the infamous certification boot camp issues of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, certifications carried a lot of value. They were hard to obtain and there was very little possibility that someone had cheated or whatever.
10 Spiceworks topics a day asking which certs to get rather than worrying about experience, with 500 responses from people equally inexperienced and uncertified telling them what to do. It's a plague. I got most of mine way back when.
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I'm not shocked or even too dismayed that people still ask about it. Certs still have "some" value, mostly because hard work from the certification authorities is helping them to make a come back by making braindumps useless. Boot camps, though, are so common that they are now almost all that there is, they are just an assumption with some certs and even mandatory (Vmware, I'm looking at you) with others (which is why I see Vmware certification as absolutely worthless and even possibly a negative.)
Of course, this exact boot camp process is now what everyone is complaining about high schools doing (and elementary) which "teaching to the test" being the high school very of boot camping. Memorize answers, understand nothing.
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@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
It's a single country's oversight, a single accreditation system - if anyone does it, the bar is lowered.
This is why you shouldn't talk about shit you don't know about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation
There is no single accreditation system. The "national" accreditation "systems" are used by for-profit diploma mills like DeVry and UoPHX. Each region uses their own standards and are used as the benchmark of a educational institution.
The process is more detailed than a SOX compliance audit. I've done both.
You want to knock down the national ones? Fine, it's been a hot topic within higher ed for a long time. We know they are stupid, but people have been doing this crap for centuries. International Business Machines (IBM) is a different company than International Baccalaureate Ministries (IBM). But don't dare lump their lax standards against the regional accreditation boards that have been doing this shit for a long time. And if you can't tell the difference between the two, you deserve what you get.
When India does this shit:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826
The weight of the argument that US schools are shit is complete bullshit. Even if US education systems were as bad as you think, other countries are far, far, far worse.
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@PSX_Defector said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
It's a single country's oversight, a single accreditation system - if anyone does it, the bar is lowered.
This is why you shouldn't talk about shit you don't know about.
The NAME is regional, but they are not. They are actually the US national accreditation. They are overseen by a single group. I am quite aware of their marketing term and regional breakdowns. That's not relevant and was well known when I posted.
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@PSX_Defector said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
It's a single country's oversight, a single accreditation system - if anyone does it, the bar is lowered.
This is why you shouldn't talk about shit you don't know about.
And here is the reference, from the site that you linked, that shows how all of your so called "regional" are part of the "national" oversight from the singular department of education. The name regional is misleading. I'm not talking about breaking it down by region and nor is anyone outside of the US. It's the cumulative integrity of the entire system as approved by the singular, national DoE system:
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@PSX_Defector said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
There is no single accreditation system. The "national" accreditation "systems" are used by for-profit diploma mills like DeVry and UoPHX. Each region uses their own standards and are used as the benchmark of a educational institution.
There is, the regionals are in turn accredited by the DoE. They each have the power to tweak regional quality levels to make one region better or worse than another but their are overseen together as a single system with overall quality levels required at the national level.
That one region might have lower or different standards to another is also a problem, but there is some argument that US regions are large enough to overcome this problem nationally even when seen from abroad and another argument that while it still goes to the lowest common denominator at least there is the single DoE lowest level that will be allowed. In either case, if the system was truly doing its job well, we would not have a major issue with it.
But that there is a single, national accredidation oversight only a pretence of regionality or autonomy is pretty much without question.
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@PSX_Defector said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
The weight of the argument that US schools are shit is complete bullshit. Even if US education systems were as bad as you think, other countries are far, far, far worse.
Sure, some are, and they get recognized as such. No one takes India seriously. If "India is totally garbage as seen by an American" is your argument, I think you've made my case. Because in India, lots of people think that their accreditation or reputation is fine and would make the same arguments that you are making.
What I'm saying is that the US is headed in this direction and the response that I got outside of the US was exactly your response to India. You've demonstrated by point perfectly.
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@tonyshowoff said in Don't Stay in School:
@scottalanmiller said in Don't Stay in School:
In IT we know this process well because of the infamous certification boot camp issues of the early 2000s. In the 1990s, certifications carried a lot of value. They were hard to obtain and there was very little possibility that someone had cheated or whatever.
10 Spiceworks topics a day asking which certs to get rather than worrying about experience, with 500 responses from people equally inexperienced and uncertified telling them what to do. It's a plague. I got most of mine way back when.
This is a double edged sword.. no cert no job, no work history, no job..
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You've actually also made another very important point - inside the US there is this marketing and branding that "regional" accreditation is good and "national" is bad. Now I've never attended a non-regional accredited school but I can testify to the lax standards of the regional accreditation. But that's not the point, the point is that the terms are misleading, probably intentionally, because it serves to make viable excuses like we've seen here, but it's really a farce. The system is still centrally controlled and overseen by the government in the end, not regional authorities, they are just contractors doing part of the work so that the government can keep it at arm's length and act like the industry is self regulating or something. Americans often believe that the system is not nationalized simply because of the name.
This is, I'm sure, not known at all outside of the US and the system is simply seen as the US education system. The US is seen, generally, as a single market (which it actually is.) They would, I would expect, be aware of accredited (regional) and non-accredited (what you call national or neither) but would not really be aware of the differences in regions and simply see it as "US accredited", even if not vocalized, that's how it would be perceived. The nuances that we see internally would be lost. That's why people say "US University" not "Middle States Ac University." And they are actually more correct than not, since it is DoE accredited that is what they are interested in and care about and what they are referring to.
