Florida Atlantic University: PhD in CS $34K

[Stanislav]

You should go back and see the recent posts in that thread. Some of the senior members there did a little investigative research and discovered that the school is publishing bogus research. It appears that the school was setup to be Trump outlet based on their research. I think someone in that thread said that the university is going to lose its accreditation in the next review. It goes back to that adage, "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is".
Also, just to let you know professional doctorates are considered to be equivalent to Ph.D's. They are fully qualified to be on Ph.D. committees, be Ph.D readers and take on other academic-type roles. The most recognized professional doctorates are the DBA's and EdD's.  I Googled it and found that graduates with these degrees (and other common professional doctorates) hold tenured faculty positions at top universities like MIT and Stanford. So you can earn a professional doctorate (wouldn't recommend FAU though) and have all the privileges a Ph.D holder has.

Whoa. That's seriously overreaching.

FAU is a member of Florida's public university system, is 60 years old, more than 30 thousand students, a medical school, yadda yadda. It's not going away any time soon (full disclosure: I went to Floida State University, PhD'08). I doubt they can do much about the one dope on their faculty (out of hundreds); might be reluctant to do anything seeing the current political climate. A school that had their accreditor worried is the supposed "flagship", University of Florida, over admins trying to silence some professors trying to serve as expert witnesses in a case inconvenient to Governor DeSantis. Even in that case, and as much as I would want to embarrass them Gators - no one is in any serious danger of losing their accreditations. Another issue is a Republican bill trying to require universities to rotate their accreditors every five years - which is so stupid it can't possibly become law.

In short, FAU is a solid place. I'd say anything with "Florida" in its name lost a little bit of reputation thanks to close association with Trump and sorry ass people that keep winning nationwide offices there (De Santis, Scott), but this is at best a minor consideration for someone after a PhD in Computer Science, people.