Here’s a sobering video from CNN about a woman who bought into a series of bogus real estate courses that promised fast riches by purchasing foreclosed properties a no money down. She spent a bundle, earning nothing after working long days for months to try and make deals, and is now suing the company that used high pressure sales tactics to bilk her of more than $10,000. It’s an extreme example (and this one wasn’t an online course), but since real estate training is very popular online, we’ll pose it as one more example of how you need to be careful about studying the credentials of the school you are going to before you write any tuition checks. See the CNN video here.

There’s lots of controversy about whether or not the current system of accrediting both online and offline schools should be changed. But for now, a small group of organizations, many of them regional in nature, control which schools get approved and which don’t. Read Understanding Accredited Online Degree Courses for an overview of the current system.

It will only be of real interest to you if you mean to take the bar exam in California, but Kaplan University now has a law school – the former Concord Law School. Because of Kaplan’s status, this will open up far more opportunities for government financial aid to students at the new “Concord Law School of Kaplan University.” Its law students will qualify only for the bar exam in California. Kaplan, by the way, is owned by the Washington Post Company.
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Update
I didn’t realize how very limited online law degrees were until I saw this post from a very knowledgeable blogger. Check out his more subtle explanation of how the Concord/Kaplan story plays out against a background of the American Bar Association’s contining resistance to online legal education.
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Here’s a absolutely classic illustration of how hard it is, even for a college professor, to choose an online degree program that fits their career objectives. The Beaumont Enterprise recently reported that a tenured professor at Lamar University in Texas is in hot water because of a psychology Ph.D. she got online from California Coast University. That school, unfortunately, is on a list of colleges the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board says gives out degrees that are “fraudulent” or “substandard.” The professor says her course of study at CCU cost her thousands of dollars and involved a great deal of hard work. Fortunately, she won’t lose her job because she was originally hired on the strength of another degree she got from UCLA. She’s lucky — she could have been charged with a misdemeanor if Lamar had hired her on the basis of the California Coast University degree. It all goes to show that, with professional training in particular, you need to make sure the degree you’re getting online matches your employer’s requirements exactly.
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Also, here a good source of info on which colleges and universities are accredited in Texas

Here’s a list of added resources you can use to check on whether your online school has the proper accreditation.
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The U.S. Education Department is currently debating a new rule that would prevent colleges from looking closely at the accreditation status of a school before deciding whether or not to accept credits from it. A new government panel on the issue has lots of representatives from for-profit schools, who are pushing for acceptance of this “blind accreditation” rule. Representatives of the traditional major accrediting agencies don’t want to see their quality assessments watered down, and are opposing the new rule. If “blind accreditation” passes, it could make it easier for online students to transfer credits into a traditional college, but could also help create lots of new fake “life experience” schools and diploma mills.
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