Is There A Need For An ABET-accredited Masters Degree?
Q: MIT started a five-year Bachelor/Master of Engineering program in their
electrical department. Has anyone developed a stand-alone Master of
(Science in) Engineering program that is ABET-accredited?
Such a program would be available to individuals who hold bachelors
degrees from any field. It would probably take about three years to
complete all the typical engineering science and design courses, plus a
token masters project.
Such a degree program might be more attractive than a second bachelors
degree. Do you think that there would be significant demand for such a
program?
A:Remember, there are some
unaccredited schools that are not degree mills. When a student
attempts to transfer credit from such a school to, say, a regionally
accredited school, one of the first things the "to" school will look at
is the credentials of the person who taught the course at the "from"
school. If the "from" school does not have the reputation of being a
degree mill, if it has a legitimate reason for not being accredited, if
the course instructor had legitimate credentials, and if no other "red
flags" appear, there is no reason that the credits will not be
accepted.
In other cases, the "from" school may be accredited by a DoEd-approved
accreditor, albeit not a regional accreditor. Such is often the case
with religious colleges, which carry an AABC accreditation rather than
a regional one.
Finally, your friend was obviously selective - he or she transferred 9
credits, not an entire degree's worth. Wht is unusual, however, is
that the "to" school accepted 9 credits - most master's programs, even
among regionally accredited schools, accept only 6 credits in transfer
toward a master's degree. (The number is much higher for undergraduate
programs). Since you specified that the credits were transferred from
a generic school to an accredited *U.S.* master's program, that implies
that the original credits came from a foreign school; since foreign
schools are not accredited at all, this one may have actually received
less scrutiny than a non-accredited program in the U.S. Even then,
however, the fact that the U.S. school accepted more than six credits
toward a master's degree is out of the norm.
I was recently asked if there was a need
at all for ABET-accredited Bachelor