PA Sues Online 'University' For Spamming

CousinLarry writes "Online 'university' Trinity Southern University (Google cache of disabled site homepage) has been sued by the state of Pennsylvania." Besides spamming, this self-described school has, as another reader points out, "awarded an MBA to a cat owned by an undercover Pennsylvania deputy attorney general." I bet my cat could get a PhD.

Comments

Real Victim

[teiresias]

The real victim here is any online College or University that's trying to become a credible institution. With process stories like this few people will want to take the option of online Universitys and even fewer employers will take them seriously.

Re:Real Victim

[C10H14N2]

Considering how seriously employers take undergrad degrees while simultaneously disregarding their actual worth, in most cases, I really don't see much difference between an actual degree--regardless of where it's from--and one written in crayon on the back of a cocktail napkin. Maybe straight out of college with no experience, sure, but when people have a decade or more of experience, I don't care if you graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard. What you've done in the decade since going to Harvard is far more important to me than your fscking bachelor's degree.

Re:Real Victim

[NeoSkandranon]

So in other words, if I graduated from a small private college, I'm fucked cause he's too lazy to look something up?

What happens when you don't force accreditation

[Nine Tenths of The W]

I'll take Britain's godless socialised education every day over educational free market capitalism. Employers shouldn't have to waste time determining whether a university is real or not. This is just as disruptive as the fear of litigation that prevents people giving bad references

Re:What happens when you don't force accreditation

[will_die]

It is not really a problem. Thier are several well known accreditation boards which are accepted. The boards range in accrediting the whole school to ones that accredit just a degree.
As for employees most don't worry about it. Thier is a set of books which they use, they look up the school and can check who it is a accedited by and dates. The human resource department does this, at the same time it is verifing that the person actually graduated.

Re:What happens when you don't force accreditation

[Albanach]

In a "Godless socialised education" system, there's no incentive to succeed whatsoever. When public schools do bad, they just get more money, and their "customers" have no choice. They are forced to go to them. Monopolies are bad, especially when the Government has them.

With your great education have you even looked at education beyond your own borders? Do you think other governments aren't capable of recognising the place for rewarding success? Do you think governments are incapable of intervening when they see failure?

In the UK there's no obligation to go to your local school, you can pick any as long as you have the grades to get accepted - and others in Europe can pick one of our universities too. Yet in the US if you don't have the necessary cash you may well be forced to stay in state and go to a local school rather than explore the best that should be available to your academic ability.

I would still take a mediocre private education over the best our Government can offer, thanks.

Ever head of Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, Glasgow, Edinburgh? If your government can't offer better perhaps it's time you elect a new government? Free market education determines that access is based as much on wealth as it is on academic ability. That's plain wrong.

Re:What happens when you don't force accreditation

[dAzED1]

you don't get it.

It harms the reputation of ALL online schools, and American schools in general. If a person is born poor, and works his ass off to go to a good school that he can afford...one that isn't well known...then that school is much more likely to be dismissed as worthless by a prospective employer now.

The point isn't that the people who started this online "school" might (since its only "might") go to prison, the point is that the damage is already done, and for every one of these you remove, another dozen will have found a loophole in the unrestrainted market and will be doing the same thing again. A cat got a degree? Ok, so the next fake online school will simply have you verify age, and species. Maybe take a test that any 4th grader could pass, and give you a "MBA" if you pass it. Tada.

The damage is still done. Maybe not to those who can afford to go to internationally reknown Ivy league schools...but not everyone can afford to go to those. There is a happy medium between complete government control, and none at all.

I don't understand

[Icarus1919]

I really don't understand the furor over this. It wouldn't be the first college degree mill out there, and it certainly won't be the last. The only one whom people who get this sort of degree are cheating is themselves. I mean, sure, at first it may seem like they are cheating employers that take this sort of thing at face value, but it'll be pretty obvious once they start fucking up their job royally because they don't know what they're doing.

Re:I don't understand

[Feanturi]

I've been getting these diploma spam emails for almost as long as there has been spam, and it always struck me as fraud and made me wonder why they weren't being arrested. You're not just cheating yourself, you get cheated as well, and for money. That's fraud, as it devalues the real thing, and fleeces the ignorant. It's about time someone started getting in trouble for it, only took like 11 years or so.

Re:uce@ftc.gov

[xtracto]

Well that's the problem of living in a country where the education is kind of private, in other countries (like Mexico) high education does not cost that much so everyone can afford it.

Depends on what you expect from one

[Moraelin]

In the end, it's not really whether the cat or the dog is smart, it's whether it does what you expect from a pet. That's usually (A) what people mistake for "intelligence" and also (B) what motivates them into grasping at straws for "proof" that their favourite pet is smart.

Some people seem to like the unconditional obedience of an animal hard-coded to obey the pack leader. Even if the "pack leader" is a human.

In that case it's "Bowser is soo smart. He comes here when I call him!" And typically also "bah, cats are dumb/evil/etc because they can't be bothered to obey."

Some of us, on the other hand, have no need for basically a biological Tamagochi hard-wired to obey.

We like a cat precisely _because_ it's independent and doesn't need a "master". Cats are not pack animals, so they really have neither a "master", nor "servants" or "staff". You may be a cat's room mate, or friend, or a danger to be avoided, or (in rare cases) even an enemy. Either way, you can know that it's the cat's genuine assessment of you, and not some hard-wired reflex kicking in.

So we tend to generalize and anthropomorphise the other way around. "Yay, Fluffy is so smart because she can think for herself and doesn't need a master." And conversely "Dogs are complete retards for _needing_ to be someone's slave."

In reality, both points of view are false and based on false premises.

An animal's intelligence is what helps it stay alive in its natural environment, _not_ how well it fits your emotional need. In that aspect, both felines and dogs/wolves are "smart", just in different ways.

Wolves have perfected survival by hunting larger prey in packs, so teamwork and having a pack leader is essential. A lone wolf can't kill, say, a deer, so acting as a pack is what their very survival depends on. So for the pack to work, the animals are basically hard-wired to follow and obey the leader. It's a survival trait.

Felines on the other hand, with some exceptions (e.g., lions), live on prey they can kill one-on-one. Not only they don't need a pack to hunt, and not only there isn't enough meat on their prey to feed a whole pack, but a pack would also get in the way of stealth. If you've watched a cat hunt a mouse, you've noticed that it relies on not being seen until it gets within relatively short range. Trying to do that as a whole pack of cats, would just dramatically increase the chances of being detected early.

Hence, for cats the survival trait was to _not_ follow someone else.

Both approaches work, so they're both intelligent.

The real criminal

[RealProgrammer]

is the Deputy Attorney General, for falsifying an application.

Trinity is the victim of fraud. Not that they appear to work very hard to avoid it, but why is the DAG working so hard to entrap them?