ACICS Accredited - No faculty & No students

[bjcheung77]

ACICS in the news again, this was a very interesting read. I still couldn't wrap my head around what actually happened and how ACICS didn't even find out until earlier. Investigation it is, but what would that do? Get rid of that accreditation agency for good or merge it with another agency such as ACCSC or DEAC after they fire all the "upper echelon at ACICS" and be done with it already...

Reagan National University News Link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/educ...891749002/

[Old Guy]

The newspaper "expose" was February 27, 2020. On December23, 2019 ACICS directed Reagan National University to show cause why they shouldn't be punted. Are we sure this isn't an example of an accreditor functioning as it should and a reporter adding a little jet fuel to a story. I suspect the origin of the story was the show cause order itself.

[Johann]

The newspaper "expose" was February 27, 2020.  On December23, 2019 ACICS directed Reagan National University to show cause why they shouldn't be punted.  Are we sure this isn't an example of an accreditor functioning as it should and a reporter adding a little jet fuel to a story.  I suspect the origin of the story was the show cause order itself.

I think it has been a long, long time since ACICS functioned as an accreditor should. It was problematic long before it was de-activated and then re-activated by Betsy DeVos.  The whole Reagan National (and antecedents) thing has been a subject of interest on the other forum for some years. Here it is in brief.

20 years ago, S. Dakota was a hotbed of unaccredited schools - around 20 of them at one point. Then the State cleaned up all the lax laws and Saturday night in some of those"school"  towns was never the same again.

A bunch of years later - some people on the forum (I was one of them) noticed increased activity - the starting of two or three new unaccredited schools in S. Dakota. which had been free of such for years. One of them was the revived Si Tanka University (Sioux: "Big Foot") which was previously a Native-run school which had lost its accreditation and then closed.

In 2017 or thereabouts, info surfaced that the new activity was largely the brainchild of a Chinese national who also owned schools in Switzerland and UK, which appeared to market mainly to Asians.  He was president of Si Tanka up until the time it morphed into Reagan National, the school accredited by ACICS. We also found the legal loophole by which unaccredited schools had been established in S. Dakota : association with an accredited school. At least one of the South Dakota schools was partnered with a California school which had sufficient accreditation to make this possible.

Someone on the other forum remarked that this situation looked like a visa mill and there was some general agreement. Looking at this, I can't find any excuse for what happened re: accreditation, here. Re: the suggestion of a merger of a restructured ACICS, I can't see it either. Who would want their business merged - even after a purge of leaders - with an accreditor, once shut down, then revived and now scandal-plagued again? It just doesn't make sense to me. I fail to see how ACICS is going to pull itself out of this one. People at the other forum seemed to realize something was amiss for years - yes, years. Where was ACICS?

If you want to read the whole story, all you have to do is go to the search thing on the other forum. Look up Si Tanka University and also Reagan National University. You'll find one thread on all the goings on in S. Dakota and one that is fully Reagan National oriented. As I said previously, they're the same school - different incarnations.