[Saya]

Originally Posted by x-deviant-x

Accreditation today in the US applies more to transfer between schools than it does actual employment potential. All universities are NOT accredited, and accreditation is NOT required in order for a school to call itself a university. 50 years ago the term "University" carried prestige - today it's just a fancy title to make the school look/sound more appealing to potential customers - aka students.

Sooooo? I've never heard of the term "university" ever been something you had to meet certain criteria for. You know you can call yourself a doctor if all you do is prescribe water that has once touched shark oil because you believe water has memory? The title of doctor once had so much prestige!! Especially back when leeches were a cure for the headache.

The Department of Education has a HUGE list of schools that are accredited by organizations they trust. And it does go a long way to tell if a school is legit, if they didn't bother or didn't qualify to get accredited, something is fishy.

Many universities are only regionally accredited, if at all, very few nationally or internationally, and accreditation is granted entirely by private accreditation organizations, not the local or federal government. Further, even regional accreditation does not guarantee your credits will be accepted or recognized by another school in the same region. It entirely depends on the school you're transferring to as to whether or not their review board accepts your transfer credits - read: how much tuition they want to soak you for. Because when it's all said and done, colleges/universities are nothing more than an industry - one of the largest industries in this country, possibly THE largest - and their first priority is making money. "Student Advisers" are little more than sales reps that are trained to tell you whatever it takes to get you to sign loan papers.

Yeah, universities need to make money, unless you're suggesting they should be fully publicly funded with tax money and free for anyone, like it is in countries like Norway. If you don't think that should be, you can kindly go fuck yourself because this is how capitalism works. Until then, tuition is the only thing that keeps it going, and departments lose funding if they can't fill the seats. A lot of arts departments are getting funding cut actually because everyone goes to trade school now thinking that'll save them from unemployment. Or they get very specific degrees like a Nursing degree, because we always need nurses, right? Well, that was true until the graduating class this year found that Eastern Health is faced with budget cuts and have a hiring freeze. Two years ago we were just desperate for nurses. We're all told B.As are useless, but they're the most flexible.

And actually a lot of grad programs fund students to go there if you got the grades and even employ you while you work on your masters or PhD. Its actually possible for Harvard to be cheaper than state university in California because they operate on a sliding scale if you got the grades.

And regarding transfers, here all recognized universities have an agreement that you can transfer credit equivalents in the first two years of undergrad. In the states however a school has a right to say no whatever their reasons are. I would imagine with so many more universities its trickier to coordinate what all other schools equivalences are. For example, lets take Religious Studies. One school only focuses on Abrahamic religions. Another school allows students the choice to focus on Eastern religions, contemporary religions, or the philosophy of religion, what have you. The credits about Eastern Religions are useless to a program that only teaches Abrahamic religions.

And that's something else about a degree, an undergrad degree usually ends up with you focusing on something, and a masters degree even more so. When you apply for a masters, you have to find a professor at the universities you're looking at that has a topic that interests you AND you had some experience with in your undergrad. On a masters level its no good for me to go on to study Confucianism if I've only learned about it once in an intro course in my first year, and I can't speak Chinese. So if a transfer ultimately leads to no real focus, you're kinda fucked.

That's why it's so important to research the school you're wanting to attend, AND the potential job market for the degree you're pursuing. A business degree from Phoenix University or DeVry University is by no means the same as a business degree from Harvard or UCLA or even UCF. And even then, the Harvard of 2012 is a far cry from the Harvard of 1912.

Yeah, Harvard was much better back when we didn't know what DNA was.

As for degrees or diplomas being "useless", it really depends on the degree/diploma and who the employer is that's looking at it at the moment. And in this economy, it really doesn't matter where your degree comes from, because the chances of a college grad finding work right now are pretty damned slim, considering nearly 30% of recent college grads are unemployed or barely employed in the US (last I checked - it may be higher than 30% now) and we just broke the $1-trillion mark on defaulted federal student loans in the last couple months.

Uh, not quite. I have a lot of friends who went to this private college that can be okay if you're learning a demonstrable skill like photography, but otherwise everyone knows its a terrible school and only certain trades that have been vetted by provincial committees will get you a job.

This just doesn't even make any sense. I wasn't talking about Obama's robot planes, or shooting anything down.

So why would you need a gun?