"Promoting Truth and Common Sense in Accreditation"
Diploma Mills
One man's Harvard or Yale is another man's "diploma mill."
One man's Oxford or Cambridge is another man's "diploma mill."
This loaded phrase developed to refer to competitors offering better educational quality at a lower cost and whose existence threatened the older, more established schools. In this way, students would continue to borrow money from the federal government to finance their overpriced educations and feed the traditional educational system.
According to the definition and misuse of the phrase "diploma mill," Harvard, the other Ivy League schools, Oxford, Cambridge and the world's finest universities were "diploma mills" at one time.
Many, if not most, traditional colleges and universities are overpriced, bureaucratic cartels filled with employees who add nothing to the educational process. Moreover, these same institutions are not focused on the student; rather, they are tenured-professor and institutionally-focused.
From Dr. Thomas Sowells' book, Economic Facts and Fallacies
"Since a college's or university's academic prestige (unfortunately) depends primarily on its professor's research and publications, students will not...get a better education at the more prestigious institutions with the higher paid faculty...
One of the biggest fallacies about academic institutions is that attendance at big-name colleges and universities is virtually essential for reaching to top later in life." (Nothing could be further from the truth as most people already know.)
The four institutions with the highest percentage of their undergraduates going on to receive PhDs are all small colleges, with fewer than 2,000 students...Some have fewer than 1,000 students...
Of the chief executive officers of the 50 largest American corporations surveyed in 2006, only four had Ivy League degrees and just over half graduated from state colleges, city colleges, or a community college.
Some including Michael Dell and Bill Gates did not graduate at all."