Engineering Degree Online | Your tax dollars at work??

Posted by bposton on November 7th, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

Here’s a statistic that just burns me up…

Back in September of 2004, the Government Accountability Office released a report that found federal
agencies had spent at least $169,000 for their employees to obtain degrees from two so-called “diploma mills,”
California Coast University and Kennedy-Western University.

The GAO report defined diploma mills as “non-traditional, unaccredited, post-secondary schools
that offer degrees for a relatively low flat fee, promote the award of academic credits based on
life experience, and do not require any classroom instruction.”

That’s $169,000 of YOUR tax dollars going out to diploma mills, my good friend.

In the report, however, it was also mentioned that no “uniform verification process” exists for such institutions,
particularly online degree programs.

Don’t you think we need a verification process? Otherwise this number will just get higher, and probably already has.

At there are some states who have taken the initative. These include Oregon and California,
who have refused to recognize Kennedy-Western degrees.

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engineering degree online : Indiana distance learning skyrockets

Posted by bposton on October 24th, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

I read an article today that focused on the growth of distance learning just in the
state of Indiana.

Although the numbers here are specific to that state, I think they reflect the trend
across the nation - online education is growing fast and furious.

OK, so in Indiana alone, there were 104,000 student enrollments in distance-learning classes during the 2003-04 academic year, according to the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunications System.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Nearly 90,000 of the enrollments were for online courses, which for that state is a 57 percent increase from the previous year.

If you took those students that were taking online classes under what would translate to a full time status, and put them all together in one place, they would phycially represent the sixth-largest university in the state - over 10,135 students. By comparison, Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne this year has about 11,000 students.

I’m pretty sure this is a nation-wide trend.

Distance education has been around in one way shape or form for over 100 years, but of course the delivery and quality of this type of education has changed drastically in the past few years.

This came about With the rise of the Internet, and now students can get degrees from prestigious universities in the comfort of their own homes.

Nonetheless, there still appears to be a sort of stigma with this term “distance learning” or “distance education”, which I guess is a throw-back to the correspondence courses Sally Struthers used to promote on late-night television commercials as a way to make more money.

Unfortunately, this stigma has been helped in recent years by the growth of online diploma mills, which essentially sell diplomas with little or no college coursework. A dark underbelly of this trend which can also be associated to the rise of the internet.

But the trend is good because local colleges and universities are trying to erase that stigma while they try to increase their enrollments and provide students a way to get a degree who don’t have time for a traditional college education.

So think about it. The person you sit next to at work, the waitress at the cafe, the solider in Iraq, or Afghanistan; there are people from all over the country taking online courses and getting their degree. And they all have at least one thing in common. A desire to improve their lives while maintaining their current lifestyle and schedules.

Ben

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