Credited VS Unaccredited Degrees, licensing, educational standards and the Case of Tammy Yard McCracken, a doctor by some standard but not others

Update Biographical and Educational Details on Ms. Tammy Yard-McCracken
Credited VS Unaccredited Degrees, licensing, educational standards and the Case of Tammy Yard McCracken, a doctor by some standard but not others

Experts? More Questions about Tammy Yard-McCracken, self described violence dynamic expert

Some time ago, I wrote about accreditation and higher education. I also wrote about how I had attended a seminar where one of the presenters advertised herself as having a doctorate, did not strike me as sounding like someone who had a  doctorate, and then did research and discovered it was not an accredited Ph.D. but instead a "psychological doctorate in holistic psychology" from an unaccredited school called "The Eisner Insitute of Professional Studies." (For details, click on the links that say "Violence Dynamics Seminar"or "Tammy Yard McCracken" )  I've discovered that some people do not understand the significance of this.

I intend to explain the seriousness and implications of advertising an unaccredited doctorate in this post. But for the moment, advertising an unaccredited doctorate is considered among people who hold accredited, universally recognized higher degrees to be one of the worst forms of questionable behavior known. Few in serious academic circles consider such degrees, or the people who advertise them, worthy of respect. (By contrast, it is hoped that they would show respect for someone with no degree with knowledge or accomplishments in their field, Not always, of course, but this would be hoped. By contrast, use of an unaccredited doctorate sort of causes a massive "WTF? Who do you think you are?" reaction among people who have spent years of their lives working intensively under rigorous standards to earn their degrees.)

Quick analogy, since the person was presenting at a self defence oriented event, let's ask the question, is a Black Belt in martial arts an impressive or significant credential? Does having a black belt in a martial art make the person who has acquired it a good fighter able to defend themselves at a significantly higher than average rate? What is the real value of a black belt in a martial art?

The answer, as anyone who is involved in martial arts will tell you, is that it depends on the school where they studied and what it took to earn the right to receive that credential. This varies a lot. In fact, it varies at least as much as the quality of martial arts schools. Anyone, literally anyone, can create a certificate and/ or buy a piece of cloth and give it to someone else, thereby designating them a black belt. Seriously. You can order them off of the internet from several sources just by signing a document stating that you think you deserve one.

Yet this does not mean all black belts are without value. Some are quite an honor.

The value of a black belt depends on the amount and type of training and study that was put into it as well as the quality of the instructor and the standards he or she uses to judge students and determine when and if they deserve the rank of black belt. Knowledgeable people can recognize a good martial artist by the way he or she moves and acts, and often a good black belt by knowing the quality of the institution that granted it.

And the same thing is true for most credentials including college or graduate degrees. Anyone, including me, for any reason can give you a piece of paper that says "Bachelor's of Science" or "Master's of Arts" or "Ph.D" or "doctorate" or any other credential you might wish to have.  And if you were to wish to, you could show it to people and tell them I gave you a "master's of arts" or a "PhD" or "doctorate" or any other credential I might choose to give you. Just as anyone can give anyone a certificate that says "black belt" on it. The value of a black belt, as stated above, depends on the amount and type of training and study that was put into it as well as the quality of the instructor or instructors and the standards he or she uses to judge students and determine if they deserve the rank of black belt. The same is true of academic degrees.

To judge the value of a college degree, one has to be able to judge the quality of the education the student received and how much of this education they absorbed. (which is one reason for grades, another much criticized subject that is generally still kept at colleges simply because no one has yet found a better alternative)  Just like with earning that black belt and martial arts study.

And anyone who understands the martial arts world knows it can be very difficult for an untrained (or poorly trained) person seeking martial arts instruction to judge those things.

It's the same thing with colleges.  It is very difficult for a large portion of the American public to judge the value of a degree or the quality of much college. Not only are there a wide variety of very good schools who usually only make the news when their wackier professors engage in extreme actions, while the good, hard working sensible professors get ignored, but there are societal and political forces out there that benefit by knocking the value of education and specialized knowledge.

There's a whole slew of for-profit colleges out there, for instance, who encourage uneducated, first generation college students to enroll in their institutions, set them up with loans, and then take their money and give them a sub-standard education with very low standards. (Am I the only one out there who remembers the Beverly Hillbillies episode where Jethro decides to go to college, walks outside to find a college and immediately enrolls in the first one he sees, not realizing that it is a "Secretarial College" that trains secretaries only? Yes, things like this happen in real life.)

For this reason, and several others, standards of accreditation have been set up. The system, like many in the USA (and the world), grew up piece by piece and is difficult to understand but it is nevertheless important.

There are a variety of accrediting bodies out there and they serve several purposes.

For one, they allow outside bodies to decide if a school is a good place to invest time and money to send their members.

For instance, despite holding advanced degrees, I am currently taking a couple courses as the local community college. I am eligible for financial aid or loans from several sources. However, if the community college were not accredited, then none of these sources would be willing to even consider providing me financial aid or loans. Second, when I finish the program, I will be eligible to take licensing tests for my state in a particular profession. However, if the program were not accredited, I would not be eligible for these tests. Therefore the fact that the community college is accredited, makes it and its students eligible for outside funding, but it also makes its graduates eligible for licensing. --note these two things are heavily intertwined and rarely occur at unaccredited colleges.


To get back to the above example, Tammy Yard-McCracken describes herself as a "doctor" with a "doctorate" These are true, as she does, it seems have a certificate that states she is a doctor with a doctorate and it comes from a school. However, as stated many times in many ways,, that degree is not from an accredited institution. Therefore it is unlikely that it makes her eligible for licensing as a "state licensed psychologist" and I have not been able to find any such credential for her. (And these credentials are in the public domain as governments generally wish people to be able to check and verify the licenses of the professionals they hire or consult.)  Without a degree from a credentialled body, a person is usually not eligible for the same licenses and professional credentials as someone with a degree in the same field from a credentialled body. Since her degree is not from an accredited school, it does not seem to make her eligible for licensing as a psychologist who treats patients in a regular hospital or clinic and whose services are eligible for reimbursement by most insurance programs and I am not aware of any current licenses she has to do this.

And it is for this reason that the organizations that are willing to offer me loans or financial aid to study at the community college would not offer me the same financial aid or loans to study at an unaccredited institution such as Eisner Institute for Professional Studies. (and it's worth pointing out that while some might argue this is merely a prejudice against an "on-line school" like the Eisner Institute, one of my community college courses is entirely on-line as were some of the courses when I earned my MS in Education from a state university. The difference is that my on-line courses, unlike those of the Eisner Institute, had been certified by a recognized, outside body as coming from a school that had met a certain, minimum level of quality.)

An unaccredited degree simply would not lead to the same licenses or opportunities. Most people who get unaccredited degrees either get them simply to impress people with the fact that they can attach a label like "Ph.D" or "doctor" to themselves, or because they know a particular small niche or community where the credential has value, or simply because they don't know any better.

 (As for the niches, you often see this with Bible schools. a degree from "unaccredited Bible College X" can be quite impressive among some networks of people who think "unaccredited Bible College X" is quite an impressive place even if most people outside this network find their teachings silly and their academic standards bizarre or silly. More on this later,),

 And if the funding or loans for the degree or classes are coming from a union or a government, they are providing access to the funds for this education in order to increase the amount of skilled, often licensed professionals within their realm or organization. I mentioned before I am eligible for financial aid from multiple sources for my courses at the community college. I am not, however, eligible for the same aid for the martial arts or cooking classes I have taken and enjoyed and valued at a non-accredited institution.

Now some argue that accredited and unaccredited degrees might be equal in quality and there's no way to know if they are not. (Actually most people who argue this either attended an unaccredited school, or no school at all, but that's another matter. And they usually don't argue it very well. For instance, see: http://peterhuston.blogspot.com/2018/10/a-response-to-response-in-response-to.html )


 Let's look at this. Let's look at the idea that accredited and unaccredited degrees might be equal in quality and there is no way to know if they are equal in quality or not.

First, many people underestimate what is involved in studying at a high level at a really good school. I did for many years. (I mean I was one of those kids who sat in the back of high school social studies class and wrote down on the desk each time the teacher made a mistake about history.) They also don't understand that one value of a really good school is that they actually undo people's own misunderstanding about the level of their own knowledge. In other words, they give them a reality check and bring their understanding of their own knowledge back to earth.

As an adult I decided to go to school and pursue my dream of being a Chinese history professor. I thought this was a very reasonable goal as I had done a lot of study on China, read extensively on my own on China, been to China twice, and lived for three years in Taiwan, a Chinese speaking place full of people whose ancestors had emigrated from China and who did many Chinese things and had preserved many Chinese institutions now lost on the mainland. I thought I not only deserved a Ph.D. but that I had knowledge equal to or better than many people who had actual Ph.D.s in Chinese history. And this is more or less what I wrote on the first draft of my "statement of purpose" when I applied to go to graduate school to study Chinese history. (Fortunately, a friend who was a college professor read it and advised me to start over again with a more modest -and ultimately more realistic -statement of why I wished to study Chinese history and language at the graduate level.)

When I got to Cornell, I soon learned otherwise. My knowledge and self assessment of my own level of knowledge was way off. For instance, I had no idea that in order to earn a PhD in history one had to do some very, very in-depth and comprehensive language study in order to be able to work with the source documents from the historical periods and fields that one wished to study, One of my classmates at Cornell specialized in the history of the American War in Vietnam and in order to do this he had to study modern Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and either classical Chinese or Classical Vietnamese.

 Another was working on a doctorate with a thesis in Han migration to Xinjiang in the post-war period and had to study and show ability in the Uighur language. ("Where in the world do you expect me to study Uighur?" she asked. "University of Indiana at Bloomington in their summer program, and we expect you to study for two summers and show improvement in the language during the year in between" was the answer, and off she went and that's what she did.)

As for me, I was there two years (plus another year studying Chinese in Taiwan) and spent those two years as the class idiot in Mandarin Chinese class, plus full time study in Taiwan over the summer, working on the language three hours a day, one in class and two on my own, and still struggling, often unsuccessfully, to keep up. I wrote my master's thesis on the foreign and Chinese interactions surrounding the Peking Man paleontological digs in China in the mid-war period having chosen the subject in part because many of the source documents are actually in English. Yet there was one day, I let my advisor know that I'd discovered that the English language version of one of Johann Gunnar Anderson's books was half the length of the Swedish version and lacked an important dedication to his Chinese colleague, Ding Wenjiang. --by the way, feel free to look these people up. They had fascinating lives. --  "Hmmm," said my advisor.  "Maybe you should just learn to read Swedish too?" We discussed this and it was decided that I did not need to learn to read Swedish (an interesting summer project if you have an aptitude for languages and work really, really hard but also time away from other things) but that if I ever planned to write about this stuff at the PhD level I should plan to learn to read Swedish.

When I tell my non-academic friends about this, they often scoff and say "Well, had any of the professors there actually learned all those language like that?" and the answer, for the record, is "Yes!" Yes indeed they had because that was a very important part of what being a Ph.D level history professor who is tops in your field was like to them.  And part of adjusting to that environment was learning that this level of study and this level of commitment was the norm in this field at this level.

(By the way, I mentioned before that accredited Ph.D, degrees involve a dissertation, a lengthy piece of writing that shows a high level of scholarship and makes everyone involved in the project proud to have their name on it. If you wish, you can go find and read my MA Dissertation. It's easily available for public viewing at the Cornell University library. My advisors knew this and know that its quality would reflect on them and that anyone in the world could look at it. Often with unaccredited degrees, this is not the case. The theses and dissertations are not made available. If you find a book called "In Search of Satan,"" you can read about at least one case where a so-called "police expert on Satanic crime" who advertised a doctorate and a doctoral thesis in the area of Satanic crime, turned out to not only have an unaccredited degree but his school would not allow people to see his dissertation without his written permission -definitely not standard behavior in academia. FYI, law enforcement conferences have a documented history of often bringing in self proclaimed "experts" with questionable credentials to speak. This is something I hope to write more about in the future. Tammy Yard-McCracken has spoken at at least one law enforcement conference. )

This sort of thing is commonplace in high level graduate schools. And high level graduate schools are, by definition, accredited schools whose students are eligible for financial aid and funding from several sources and whose graduates are eligible for licensing in their fields if their fields require a degree.

Accreditation basically means that a school has met a minimum standard held by one or several of many accrediting bodies.

Without it, there's no way to judge the quality of the school.

For instance, one strange thing I learned while researching this matter is guess who teaches at many schools that offer unaccredited degrees? People with unaccredited degrees, that's who. Why? Almost no legitimate school will offer a position to someone with an unaccredited degree, much less a teaching position. Therefore they can't get jobs there.

Additionally, very few people with an accredited degree will accept a teaching post at a non-accredited school. If they do, the stigma of association with a non-accredited school can follow them throughout their career. (BTW, Tammy Yard-McCracken has taught at Argosy University, an unaccredited college where students sued, claiming they were misled by admissions people as to the status and value of the degrees they were paying for and working on.
 ( see: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/02/argosy )

And the quality of admissions screening and peripheral services is unpredictable as well.

People who know me or read this blog, know that I have an odd habit of hanging out with refugees and sometimes getting mixed up in their problems. Several years ago, one of my Karen friends (the Karen being a Burmese-Thai border hill tribe that makes up a large portion of the world's Burmese refugee population) told me he was excited that he was going to go to college. "That's exciting," I said. "What's the name of the college?"

He said he didn't know, his pastor had put the thing together. Now, I rarely say these things, but the church he was attending was, in fact, a very, very dumb church and the pastor was a nice and well intentioned man who believed and did some very, very dumb things. (I try not to insult Fundamentalist Christians, in other words Christians who believe the Bible is the literally true word of God, but these folks took it one step further. The only true Bible, they insisted, the only literally true word of God, was the King James Translation of the Bible, the standard by which all other Bibles everywhere should be judged. Which was interesting because few of the Karen or other Burmese refugees, including my friend, were able to read its 17th Century English and my understanding is that while Bible scholars admit the King James Bible was a historically important translation of the Bible, few such scholars consider it a terribly good one..

I looked the school up and discovered it was an unaccredited school with four year degrees in various kinds of Bible studies and a shadowy reputation. One of its slogans was "Accredited does not necessarily mean better." (which is frightening close to the statement that someone posted here:


Nevertheless, my friend quit his job, and with the urging of his pastor moved several states to attend the school. He even came close to buying a new suit to wear while attending services.) A few weeks later he was back home near me, having been ejected for not having the English or academic standards to keep up in his classes. Now at this point, I cried "Thank you Jesus for returning our beloved young man to us whole and in one piece after his adventures among the loonies!" the only damage being economic and thus recoverable but the whole thing could have been easily avoided.

The school had checked none of these things and apparently they did not, like accredited schools generally do, required proof of English language ability (such as a mandatory minimum score on the TOEFL or IELTS or a certificate of completion from a known ESL / EFL program) prior to admission. So you can see, with an unaccredited school there's no way to know the quality of either the classes or the support services.

Fortunately, my friend, ultimately, got a manufacturing job where only minimal English is required  and now owns his own place and some rental property too. And as for the local Karen and the other refugees, those who profess Christianity have tended to create their own churches, based around their own language and ethnic group, so he's attending a nice, normal church which uses a Squaw Karen Bible, and, as an added bonus, has more singing and dancing in its services, something the Karen love to do. (And I have a higher respect for their pastor who was one of my ESL students.)


But beware of unaccredited colleges. You don't know what you'll find.

So, accredited means:

1. Meets minimal academic standards

2. Because of this, unlike an an unaccredited school, an accredited school is eligible for many sources of outside aid and funding.

3. Because the school meets these guaranteed minimal standards, its graduates are eligible for licensing in fields where an unaccredited degree would not make them eligible.

and, at a graduate level,

4. at  a graduate level, theses and dissertations are often available for public scrutiny and use and considered as a valuable addition to the field in which the writer who prepared the work studied.

So, why would someone obtain an unaccredited degree or doctorate? Usually because either:

1. They wished to impress and be indoctrinated within the teachings of a particular group (sort of like some black belts actually.)

or

2. They don't know the difference between the value of an accredited or unaccredited degree (and when they learn problems can happen, again see: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/02/argosy as happened at this school where Tammy Yard-McCracken was on the faculty.)

or

3. They think nobody else will know the difference. For the record, Tammy Yard-McCracken is not the only person with an unaccredited degree who I've been able to detect play acting their imitation of a legitimate academic. These people often really do believe that academia and professorship really is nothing more than a process of throwing bullshit around unaware that some people are trained to actually check facts and get to the heart of things. See 

As for the need for the degree, while the flier labelled her as "Dr. Tammy Yard-McCracken" nothing she did that day required any degree of any kind. She basically ran a program on the law and self defense where she mostly regurgitated material from the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network
( see https://armedcitizensnetwork.org/en/ ) and helped run people through one of Rory Miller's drills. When she was a presenter at the 2013 Women in Federal Law Enforcement Conference, advertisements said "Self Defense. Dr. Tammy Yard-McCracken", Krav Maga Global Instructor," On the Great Courses website, which offers her course on self defense, it also says "Dr. Tammy Yard-McCracken." One might perhaps wonder if the primary purpose of the unaccredited degree, which is not generally useful for becoming a licensed psychologist able to offer insurance reimbursable services as a psychological doctor, might be to advertise herself as a self defense instructor.

By contrast, a couple of my friends, both professors, with legitimate, accredited doctorates, usually hide them in situations when they are not relevant. (And aren't psychotherapists supposed to skilled in raising people's self esteem and confidence so they don't feel the need to lean on shallow props to make themselves look important? Something to think about perhaps.)

For More Reading See: 

https://www.50states.com/college-resources/accreditation.htm


https://ope.ed.gov/dapip/#/home


https://www.ed.gov/accreditation


https://www2.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/index.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20100615135829/http://chea.org/pdf/RecognitionWellman_Jan1998.pdf

https://blog.prepscholar.com/accredited-online-high-school

Finally, please note that the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, an organization mentioned on the Eisner Institute of Professional Studies website, is not an accrediting body. It's basically an organization merely ensures that schools have enough financial stability to be around to teach the classes they accept tuition for. It does not get involved in judging the quality of the classes or schools themselves. In other words, if you give money to a diploma mill in California, this organization will help guarantee that they will still be around to give you your diploma mill diploma when the time comes, and that the money you spent on a questionable degree will, in fact, give you the questionable degree you paid for.