The secretary of the ED dept. announced some time ago at a CBED faculty/staff meeting that ED was going to start its own accrediting agency.  They were working on paperwork for it at that time.

"Listen to me. Tariq, Tariq. Listen to me now for a minute. I think you need to get licensed this year anyway in Mississippi, and then you should be able to use the name 'university.' That's not a problem. ... If you get an office in Mississippi and you're only operating a branch office in London, then that should be all right." . . . .
"I'm not going any further," she says at last. "I would be glad to do anything in the world for you if you fax me a bank receipt tomorrow."

I think she's a shoe-in for A. Dvoark's job when she leaves next week.

From the June 10th HA article about Kim Chaze, "USM Suits Keeps Attorney Busy" remember there was a grey inset (perhaps not available online) that listed and summarized pending lawsuits.  This is the one I find most interesting - don't know anything about it - but it may have implications for some of the current "unapproved" and "unaccreditable" programs.

Nina Carroll vs. USM, IHL, filed May 22, 2000.

"Carroll claims she was recruited into a new graduate studies program by Dr. Rosalina Hairston in the Science Education Department for fall 1998.  At the end of the 1999 spring semester she alleges she learned no such program existed or ever existed and it caused her to lose a year toward her degree.  Claim:  $60,000.  Attorney:  Edwin H. Priest.  Status:  Pending."

This is from the Mississippi Secretary of State's site. Perhaps of some interest:

http://www.sos.state.ms.us/busserv/corp/soskb/Corp.asp?277012

 

Kick

Kick again to complement OO's new thread referencing one of the same articles.

quote:

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Originally posted by: thenextstateover
"If you think USM is just headed toward being a diploma mill, check out the graduations listed in the programs at the last, say 5 or 6 graduations, specifically look at the specialists and doctoral levels in Ed Leadership...............NO world class university would allow a single faculty member to hood/advise/graduate 9 folks per semester. That's ridiculous! It's insane..........go to a tier 1 institution or a real world-class institution, it simply wouldn't be allowed.   "

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How very interesting. How many graduate faculty are in that department?

quote:

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Originally posted by: thenextstateover
" check out the graduations listed in the programs at the last, say 5 or 6 graduations, specifically look at the specialists and doctoral levels in Ed Leadership...............NO world class university would allow a single faculty member to hood/advise/graduate 9 folks per semester.

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I've heard that the number of doctoral graduates awarded over there is what enables USM to be designated Carnegie I. Adult Education with only two faculty members seems to pump out doctorates by the scores. Somebody should do the numbers without those departments and see if USM still meets Carnegie I criteria.

I saw the #'s and I am appalled. What they're doing over in Ed Leadership and Adult Ed. has always been considered a joke. Many good faculty members got out of there because they saw how wrong it was too.  Too many fish in the frying pan.

quote:

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Originally posted by: foot soldier
" Let me get this straight. If we got rid of the Ed Leadership and Adult Ed. doctorates . . . would we still be Carnegie I? Obviously, if the psych dept. were suddenly blown away by a tornado we wouldn't. Help me, expert number crunchers."

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One would need to look at the specific Carnegie I criteria before your question could be answered. You mentioned Psy. During the reporting period Psy as a department awarded only 17 doctoral degrees which is not at all unreasonable given their faculty resources.

quote:

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Originally posted by: stinky cheese man
"carnegie is a little more complicated than the number of doctoral degrees awarded.  it is the number awarded across a particular number of CIP categories.  Ed leadership may contribute to the quantity element but doesn't help with the distributional requirement.  The distributional requirement is also affected by programs that have doctoral programs but produce few graduates.  one department over a 5 year period produced 1 phd.  but, carnegie is redoing it's system and it will change dramatically in the next few years."

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That's why I said that one would have to know the specific criteria for Carnegie I status. I don't have that information. Does program quality enter the formula? For many years Psy the average GRE scores of Psy students were among the highest, if not the highest, at USM. Nor is theirs is not a "quickie" degree. Some programs in Psy take full-time enrollment for 5 full years including summers.

The Carnegie foundation stiopped using the doctoral 1 designation some time ago (2000). Nowadays, a comprehensive university can aspire to 1 of 2 categories:

1. Institutions conferring a total of at least 50 doctorates per year across at least 15 fields were assigned to Doctoral/Research Universities—Extensive.

2. Institutions conferring a total of at least 10 doctorates per year across at least 3 fields, or 20 doctorates overall, were assigned to Doctoral/Research Universities—Intensive.

(http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/Classification/CIHE2000/technotes.htm)

The rational for the change can be found on the same site:


Motivation for Changes: Doctorate-granting Institutions

We eliminated the use of federal funding to differentiate doctorate-granting institutions for two reasons. First, federal support is at best a rough proxy for an institution’s research activity that suffers from several weaknesses. Not all research is federally funded, and institutions differ in the proportion of all research that is funded from federal sources. Similarly, academic fields differ in their reliance on federal research funding and also in the costs associated with research. Thus a focus on federal dollars pays greater attention to fields that are heavily dependent on federal funding and also to fields where research requires substantial investments. The federal obligations data are also blind to the pass-through of funds from one institution to another, as happens in the case of large projects involving research teams at different institutions. All of these factors compromise the accuracy of federal obligations as a gauge of overall research activity.

Second, the previous definitions are not reproducible using current data. The 1994 edition used total federal obligations to institutions, using data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) report series, Federal Support to Universities, Colleges, and Nonprofit Institutions. These reports included data on federal agencies’ obligations to colleges and universities for science and engineering (S&E) as well as non-S&E obligations. Beginning with fiscal year 1993 the NSF ceased reporting data on non-S&E obligations due to changes in data reporting by the U.S. Department of Education (which accounted for 91 percent of non-S&E obligations in 1993) (NSF, 1996: 11). While a statistical adjustment for this change would be feasible (in addition to adjustments for inflation and for other changes in federal support), the shift from total obligations to science and engineering obligations means that the new categories would not be comparable with the previous ones.

Given that a loss of comparability was inevitable, we decided against contriving an adjustment to afford continued use of an unsatisfactory measure. As noted in the foreword, we are planning a major overhaul of the classification system for 2005, and this agenda includes the development of more comprehensive and satisfactory measures of research activity.

The decision to discontinue the use of federal funding as a differentiating factor led us also to question the value of continuing four distinct categories of doctorate-granting institutions. This group of institutions, representing about 7 percent of the universe of institutions in the 1994 Classification, has been much more finely differentiated than the other major institutional groupings. In 1994 Master’s Colleges and Universities and Baccalaureate Colleges, with two categories each, represented respectively about 15 and 18 percent of the universe of institutions, and Associate of Arts Colleges, with no further differentiation, represented 41 percent of the universe. We have also noted that when the Classification has been used in higher education research, the four categories of doctorate-granting institutions are frequently combined into two larger aggregates.

Finally, intense status competition exists among doctorate-granting universities, and at some institutions this has led to aspirations for mobility within the Carnegie Classification—despite our insistence that the classification system is not a ranking of institutions. A concern with “moving up the Carnegie Classification” is not necessarily irrational or dysfunctional. When queried as to the importance of an institution’s classification in particular categories, many senior administrators posited a link to faculty and administrative recruitment. At public institutions, some cited the use of the Carnegie Classification for peer comparisons and the consequences for state funding, or the existence of mechanisms that designate different funding strata according to schemes based on or resembling the Classification. These factors notwithstanding, while we fully support the drive for institutional improvement and the measurement of progress toward institutional goals, we have serious reservations about the appropriateness of the Carnegie Classification for these purposes. Our decision to reduce the differentiation of doctorate-granting institutions reflected these concerns, as well.

Previous editions of the Classification have used the volume of doctoral production and also the number of academic fields represented by doctoral conferrals among the criteria to differentiate doctorate-granting institutions. For this edition, we have built upon this legacy to produce two categories of doctoral universities, Doctoral/Research Universities—Extensive, comprising institutions that award a substantial number of doctorates across a wide range of fields, and Doctoral/Research Universities—Intensive, which award doctorates in smaller numbers or in a more limited set of fields. As will be shown below, the close relationship between doctoral training and the conduct of academic research leads to a correspondence between these categories and two different measures of research funding.

At public institutions, some cited the use of the Carnegie Classification for peer comparisons and the consequences for state funding, or the existence of mechanisms that designate different funding strata according to schemes based on or resembling the Classification. These factors notwithstanding, while we fully support the drive for institutional improvement and the measurement of progress toward institutional goals, we have serious reservations about the appropriateness of the Carnegie Classification for these purposes.

Uh, Lisa . . . are you listening?

In a legal sense, this is going to be problematic for the university where in some of the pending lawsuits, they use this Carnegie 1 Extensive ranking as a rationale for some of their actions. Basically they've said that the elevation to this status changed the interpretation of the Faculty Handbook. I know of at least 3 cases where this has happened.

quote:

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Originally posted by: Black and Gold Standard
"I just purchased a copy of the new US News' America's Best Graduate School 2005 Edition. Their top 50 education schools for teacher preparation are listed on page 52. Only 40% (20) of the top 50 are NCATE accredited. Those without NCATE accreditation include schools such as Cornell, Harvard, Michigan State, Northwestern, Pennsylvania Rutgers/New Brunswick, California/Berkeley, Iowa, Michigan/Ann Arbor, and Texas/Austin. "

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Someone more knowledgeable than me correct me if I'm wrong, but these schools are in a different situation than USM, in my opinion.  They all have *national* reputations to help with recruiting students into teacher ed programs and other $$ resources to support these programs (i.e. they are viable, thriving institutions).  USM needs all the help it can get in terms of national reputation (or even regional rep at the moment, for that matter) and $$.  Therefore, NCATE accreditation is more important to USM than these other schools.  Is this a correct assumption?

Waiting for others to chime in....