Degree Mills

Ross Woods

The problem of degree mills soon arises, schools whose academic requirements are so low that students do not earn their degrees in any normal sense. Most of their motives are obviously suspect. The following characteristics occur often in Bear's review (1980):

  1. Diplomas are for sale with no academic requirements.
  2. The school is primarily a means of avoiding personal tax.
  3. The school depends on legal laxity or loopholes for its existence and operation.
  4. Academic requirements are nominal and the school often teaches by correspondence.
  5. Some create their own accreditors, not to regulate quality but to give the impression of credibility.
  6. Many, perhaps most, are institutionally unstable.
  7. Teaching staff, if they have credentials, often get them from degree mills.
  8. They are overly generous in awarding honorary degrees.
  9. Many have poor or non-existent accountability procedures.

Other characteristics, however, are more attractive to the nontraditional education movement:

  1. They often criticize traditional education, particularly for teaching by lecture.
  2. They give higher degrees for applied skills with little theoretical knowledge (or even none at all).
  3. Some are very generous in giving credit for life and work experience. The problems are whether the school thoroughly evaluates experience and whether the knowledge is appropriate for the degree given.
  4. Some defend their programs by saying that students study relatively little material but master it very thoroughly.
  5. Some criticize traditional accreditors, defending themselves by claiming to be "innovative." This argument is only valid when accreditation is only available for scientific programs or is based on rigid process criteria.
  6. Many do not give fixed street addresses, giving instead post office boxes or mail-forwarding services. Often this means they are administered from personal homes or temporarily rented offices. There is nothing wrong in using a post office box or rented premises; the question is whether the "school" will disappear overnight without discharging its commitments to its students.

Perhaps a more significant issue is the way some schools try to justify their programs with behavioral objectives. There need be no doubt that products are a means of justifying nontraditional education. If product definitions are clear and justifiable (given the considerations of program feedback), then the means can take many valid accreditable forms as long as they are consistent with the ends. However, some questionable schools claim to achieve the same results as time-based schools in less time by using "more efficient means." They then hope to prove equivalency by using behavioral objectives that they say are comparable to those of time-based schools. Their chief complaint is that time-based traditional schools artificially fill up time with busywork. (Cf. e.g. Hefferlin, 1974:148; Warren, 1974:145)

The real issue is short-cutting, not time usage; such schools invite the suspicion that they are not fully equivalent to accreditable schools. It can be true that the unusually intelligent, or those with long experience, or who learnt the same thing by practicum do not need to spend the full allotment of study time. However, the average course work student really needs at least the same time and effort as a traditional student to achieve just as much, or he is probably a short-cut. Accredited schools that use objectives do not use them as an excuse to lower their time totals.

Lightweight Programs

Unfortunately, internal consistency as a criterion lets schools become lightweight. Lightweight programs are typically well-organized, the staff feel they are doing a good job, and the students are satisfied that they are learning something worthwhile. In short, the stakeholders agree that they are accreditable.

In general, these programs are highly functional but lack content; students simply learn less that their degree signifies. Accreditors might justifiably shy away from them. The degree has changed meaning, and in this case, "different" means "devalued." TEE has faced this danger because it often deliberately works outside traditional education and has sought to develop (or sometimes rationalize) its own standards.

Degrees need their correct labels (cf. Spurr, 1970:7), and lightweight degrees are mislabeled goods. For example, a hypothetical school set up a very good short program for junior high school graduates; it went well until they wrote "Bachelor of Arts" on the diplomas. In the same way, a mislabeled M.A. might be a good graduate B.A.

The problem is necessarily vague; there is no distinct boundary between a weak but accreditable program and an unaccreditable program. Part of the problem is that lightweight-ness is equal and opposite to elitist education, which overly restricts access to study. In this case, the standards are so low that weak students can still pass. The problem is more complex than that, especially as the impression of lightweight-ness can be misleading. Public education differs widely between countries, so the value-added effect means that some countries' degree programs will validly have less content that others. Another false impression is cultural. Even if some aspects of culturally Western information are nearly valueless in some non-Western cultures, its conspicuous absence can make a program appear weak.

Moreover, nontraditional curriculum models and delivery systems can be misleading. Some nontraditional schools look weak no matter how good they are. A new school would not readily inspire confidence if it did not have large offices, was not an instructional institution, and gave specialized practitioner degrees. Similarly, a PI text can look much easier than it really is, especially when many frames require short answers. On the other hand, a long list of objectives has a smokescreen effect. It is easy make weak programs appear strong by writing impressively long lists of atomistic objectives that appear to represent a great deal more content than they actually do. It is also easy to defend the lists by appealing to the values of clarified purposes. However, the lists have a smokescreen effect because they hide how little students really learn. Some early PI writers admitted that they taught only a little of the most urgently necessary knowledge but felt that mastery was adequate compensation.

A less acceptable excuse for lightweight-ness is theological position. For example, two hypothetical seminaries in the same city offered degrees at the same level. One belongs to a mainstream denomination with a long Calvinistic tradition and with many university graduates in its membership. The other belongs to a small, new charismatic denomination with a largely undecided theology, an emphasis on enthusiastic ministry, and a poorly educated membership. Most likely the first will have far more content and be more accreditable than the second.

In the past, process accreditors simply passed a judgment based on the opinions of the visiting evaluation team, souring relationships between accreditors and schools, and inviting criticisms of "private club." Other chapters propose a variety of mutually compatible solutions. Lightweight-ness is a classification issue because the degree title does not suit the classifications of the program, and it is a consensus issue because it involves standards decided by inter-school consensus. That this problem occurs at all is good reason for accreditors to maintain some leverage in evaluation decisions.