How to Get The Degree You Want, OR Are You A Fake?
@6 June 2003
Update note,2006. Sometime in 2004 the subject of this article, Greenwich University, Hawaii, vanished into the ether forever without warning or explanation. Apparently it took its academic records to heaven too because a lot of people were left stranded on the beach. There is a new outfit at almost the same address, Akamai University, and apparently run by the ex-president of Greenwich. Now, after a long silence, the website for www.greenwich.edu has reappeared (April 2006) with an offer to provide transcripts under the stewardship of Akamai university.
Well, I was one of the unhappy punters left on the beach. A lot of work went into my version of a Greenwich degree, based on my earlier doctoral research at an Australian university. Obviously though, I no longer had a viable product to sell in the marketplace, where brand names are everything. I did the only thing possible : a second Masters degree at a safe location, the University of Newcastle, Australia (a government owned university). This degree was awarded in July 2005 with high distinctions in all subjects: see here for the testamur and transcript . Now I'm busy squirreling away at yet another PhD topic from the same place; (yeah, some dummies like me never learn to let this stuff be). In due course I'll be a very well qualified corpse.
The common labeling and evaluation of diplomas also needs some comment. Over my lifetime, there has been a severe inflation of meaning for such things. When I left high school at the end of 1961 for example, a pass was 50%, while 80% was pretty outstanding. Today students grumble at a mere 'B' grade which is now often rated at 80% and routinely awarded for very average work. As to diplomas themselves, the one year postgraduate teaching diploma I was awarded in 1976 would have the currency today in many university education faculties of a coursework Masters degree. The one year of postgraduate work I did in 1978 at U. Newcastle prior to taking on a PhD involved coursework, seminar presentations and extensive research essays in theoretical linguistics which were even reviewed by an external examiner at Macquarie University. It was all assessed at "first class honours standard" in a nice letter from the head of the department, but by regulations at the time, no diploma was awarded because I had graduated at another university in New Zealand (talk about a rip off..). Today that kind of work would almost universally be awarded with a coursework Masters qualification. In contemporary terms then, measured by real achievement, I have four of these wretched Masters things ... but that doesn't count in the marketplace.
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Are you a fake? This was the engaging header on an e-mail which recently arrived in my mailbox. Well, I admit to a fake tooth, but I think the rest of me is as real as real can be. Truth to tell, the odds are good that the world in general doesn't give a damn if I'm plastic, ivory or Martian rock. Still, the writer had in mind a qualification from my resumé, a Masters degree in Formal and Applied Linguistics, granted by the august institution of Greenwich University, Hawaii. Therein lies a tale, and regardless of my hapless fate, perhaps a lesson for other hopefuls. After all, many of the people who read these pages are engaged in that quest for the holy grail of our age, the marketable degree, and probably need as much advice as they can get.
Most people think they know what a university is. Close study however reveals a moveable feast. For employers now universities are essentially brand labels which trade on their reputation in exactly the same way as Rolex watches and and expensive automobiles. Grotesquely overpriced brand labels too. The actual innards of the places, and especially the innards of your courses or thesis, don't interest a whole lot of people. In the real world, that word 'university' refers to an ever multiplying variety of institutions, few of which have anything to do with the seminaries, then the gentlemen's study retreats of Medieval Europe where it mostly began (at least the Occidental variety). Even the bulk of state universities now are business enterprises for whom "knowledge transmission" is an industrial product.
For several decades a class of 'non-traditional' universities has been trying to emerge with varying success. The class includes places that genuinely attempt to widen the paths to knowledge for more kinds of people by evaluating their prior learning, by being flexible about subjects and delivery modes, and so on. Those are fine aims, but they don't go down well with your average 25 year-old personnel clerk who is sorting through a stack of job applications. Nevertheless the flexibility battle is slowly being won through the back door as the big established institutions, hungry for dollars, bend their own rules at the edges. The Internet is affecting this equation dramatically as online courses become commonplace. At the outer edges of this money game of course are the degree mills, who will send you a diploma by return post instead of making you suck their milkshakes for four years.
Now to my particular stake in the name game. Greenwich University (the Californian, not the English one) has certainly had a mixed history and I'd think twice about engaging it in 2003. The hazy image creates some job-getting problems for me, but at 57 I'm reluctant to invest more time and scarce cash in academic nonsense-games when there is so much else to do (in my case, to write) in a very short life. No, even now I think Greenwich is not into "selling degrees" for jam, (though god knows, after a lifetime in and around academia, I've decided that most so-called accredited universities do just that with the huge number of students who graduate knowing sweet damn-all..). For what it is worth, here is the link to the Greenwich academic requirements page: http://www.greenwich.edu/gudegreq1.htm
Greenwich University was located in Hawaii when I found it. Later it moved to Norfolk Island, which is a self-governing Australian territory, specifically of the state of New South Wales. The Norfolk Island parliament granted Greenwich University an official charter of recognition, which the NSW parliament was sort of obliged to ratify. This infuriated the regular Australian universities, and there followed a protracted period of bureaucratic civil war. Evidently things finally became unpleasant enough for Greenwich to pack up and move to California,where it began but aborted a move to seek accreditation there, and at last report had moved back to Hawaii. A recent personal note from Dr. John Bear (attached) suggests that all this has taken its toll on Greenwich leadership. Let's hope they get their act together again soon.
What follows is a cautionary tale, a brief history of my tangle with Greenwich University. It is actually in the form of a criticism I shot off to an Internet site called The Millennium Project a few months ago (they haven't replied). The Millennium Project claims to identify and expose humbug.
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I stumbled on your site by accident. You have done a nice hatchet job on Greenwich University (http://www.ratbags.com/rsoles/comment/greenwich.htm). I have no particular brief for the place... except that I hold a Masters from it, issued in 1994 when it was still Hawaii based. At least at that time it seemed like a reasonable option.
Why did I choose Greenwich? Well I had walked away from a Ph.D. candidacy at the University of Newcastle, NSW, after doing a lot of work on it, and publishing a couple of long papers (one 40 pages) in the Australian Journal of Linguistics. I was also cheesed off, because with knowledge and experience well beyond a normal MA (particularly so-called coursework MAs) I could still only lay claim to a BA.
In fact, after my preliminary postgrad' year at Newcastle, when the indigenes got Honours degrees, the university had said their regulations (at that time, 1978) had no provision for offering any scrap of paper to outsiders (I'd come from Victoria University of Wellington, NZ). The head of department gave me a nice letter saying my work was "equivalent to first class Honours standard". Personal letters don't hack a lot of kudos on the mean streets.
I went hunting for a way to get my work accredited for an MA in some manner that had a modicum of credibility, didn't cost the earth (I was nearly broke), and wouldn't involve pointless time serving in some university so they could add another postgraduate name to their books.. (most of the bastards play a game that says you come to their institution innocent of prior knowledge and can't possibly use whatever you've done before).
Bear's Guide ( http://www.degree.net/) pointed me at Greenwich as about the best available non-traditional university which could be talked into assessing my work as it stood. I assembled a portfolio. There was no additional coursework. They hired my old supervisor from the University of Newcastle as adjunct faculty. He knew me as well as anyone. He was Head of Department, and I had also taught the department's courses part-time for several years. The Greenwich system required 30 credits for an MA. His approval gave me 43 credits (47 needed for a Ph.D.).
Now you are right that Greenwich doesn't have great brand name recognition. On the other hand, it does you no honour to smear by implication everyone who might be carrying a piece of paper from the place. I'm not ashamed of anything I've written, and it is all still on my very large website, The Passionate Skeptic, http://thormay.net .
The role and status of modern universities is a vexed question. Most real research, especially in the humanities, can now be done with a good Internet connection from anywhere. Universities should be open colloquiums of active minds. Those of us who have spent years around the places know that by and large this is not the case. What of their products, the graduates? Some of course are impressive. But sadly most don't have an original idea to bless themselves with. Those shoals of 51% pass graduates, and even the plodding postgraduates who cauterize their brains with endless quotations, toddle out into the world anointed with the titles of their lofty institutions. They even believe that their knowledge is special. Certainly, employers buy the brand name, and rarely inquire after the substance of real achievement. In fact, most of those graduates understood a fraction of what they read, and quickly forget most of that. If you probe their insight, too often there is little to find. (See my little essay "Pissing On Every Lamp Post : the paradox of scholarship" at http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/scholarship.html ).
So what are we to make of the vendetta between the Australian educational establishment and Greenwich? I think this is best separated from that class of events related to sports matches (your side/my side) and tribal warfare. Greenwich is an institution; so are the Australian universities. Each are composed of imperfect individuals, some of whom are well meaning and capable, others dubious. It may be that the principals of Greenwich fall into the dubious category nowadays. I don't know. But institutions have a constant stream of clients passing through their doors, and those clients when mutated into graduates (or whatever) deserve to be taken on their individual merits.
-----------------------------------------------Well what about YOUR prospects? How do you get that ridiculous diploma, which you need for the employers, for the least cost in the shortest time? Bear's Guide (in spite of my unhappy experience) is still a good starting point. As with fashion everywhere, the best option is all a matter of taste and the company you want to keep. If you wish to sign onto the industrial academic treadmills of the 'great' universities as a lecturer, then you'll need a nice brand name degree, and one done by research, not by coursework. If you want to settle into the mosh pit of the teaching profession, coursework degrees are fine. The bureaucrats usually want 'accredited' degrees (though 'accredited' itself conceals a multitude of sins). In either case, the lecturer and the teacher, what you actually understand (let alone create) won't matter much. If you just want to impress the manager of Jones' Pickle Factory, there's a reputed suburb in Beijing where shady gents will sell you a degree from any place you fancy, and a passport too if you need that; (at one stage 80% of the immigrant applications from Shanghai to Australia featured fake qualifications..).
There is a chance of course that you are completely crazy, and want to do real research; (I still have a second, half-written Ph.D. tucked away that will take at least 500 years to properly develop..). In this case, you probably don't need to pay a university any bribe at all, or waste your life groveling to their irrelevancies. Google is one of the most awesome research tools ever invented. If you still want direct access to some very clever people, MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is in the process of putting all their coursework on the Internet -- for free. And MIT is a very fancy brand name indeed.
All opinions expressed in Thor's Unwise Ideas and The Passionate Skeptic are entirely those of the author, who has no aim to influence, proselytize or persuade others to a point of view. He is pleased if his writing generates reflection in readers, either for or against the sentiment of the argument.
"How to Get The Degree You Want OR Are You A Fake?" © copyrighted to Thor May; all rights reserved 2003
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