UCLA grinds its way to “˜diploma mill’
By Daily Bruin Staff
Jan. 27, 2002 9:00 p.m.
 Barbara Ortutay Ortutay is a former news
editor and current editor in chief of tenpercent. E-mail her at
[email protected].
Diploma mill” is a phrase commonly used for fraudulent
distance-learning “colleges” such as Columbia State
University, which claims to have given people like UCLA head soccer
coach Todd Saldaña a legitimate bachelor’s degree for a
few thousand dollars.
Of course, UCLA is not a fake, unaccredited university that
takes unsuspecting students’ money over the Internet under
the guise of granting them a degree. But is it a diploma mill?
Momentarily musing on those 300-person classes where you only
need to show up for the midterm and final, on senior-year
GE’s taken Pass/No Pass, and on undergraduates’
categorizing professors into “easy” and
“hard,” I could not help but wonder. After all, it was
the Bruin’s editorial board ““ one which I sat on
““ that warned of a “conveyer-belt” education if
UCLA lowers the amount of units students can take before they must
graduate.
But as Noah Grand reported in the May 9, 2001 edition of the
Daily Bruin, “”˜UCLA loses $17,665,782 in state funding
per year because the state only funds UCLA for full-time
equivalents ““ students taking at least 45 units per
year,’ according to Glyn Davies, assistant vice chancellor of
academic planning and budget.”
Students take about 13.1 units per quarter, and, as vice provost
of undergraduate education Judith Smith put it, “That means
we get 92 cents on the dollar,” (“L&S asks
departments to evaluate class units” Daily Bruin, News, May
9, 2001).
This was one of the reasons why the Academic Senate voted last
June to increase the number of units Letters & Science students
must take each quarter. Starting with the current freshman class,
students have to be enrolled in at least 13 units each quarter
““ as opposed to the previous 12 ““ in order to make
minimum progress. The senate also placed a cap on the maximum units
students can take in their career here.
If all goes as planned, students who currently take about 13.7
quarters to graduate will get out of here faster, leaving room for
Tidal Wave II, the influx of 4,000 additional students to UCLA over
the next decade.
No one doubts that there needs to be more room to accommodate
the children of the baby-boomer generation. But no matter how many
students UCLA can cram into a study lounge and call it a residence,
and even if construction continues until the campus is an elaborate
system of tunnels and 100-story highrises, UCLA will eventually run
out of space and resources to accommodate all its students. So, to
churn out degrees faster seems a fitting solution.
Diploma mill? Probably not, at least not yet. After all, UCLA is
a top-notch public school with a three-pronged mission of research,
teaching and public service. It has a world-class hospital and
high-quality faculty. It’s where great futures begin.
But as professor Bernard Frischer cautioned in Grand’s
article nearly a month before the unit requirements were changed,
“Student leaders and faculty will certainly want to take a
close look at the re-unitting proposal to make sure it isn’t
a mere numbers game designed to give UCLA more money for less work,
but genuinely reflects an improvement in undergraduate education
commensurate with the proposed increase in units.”
Of course, UCLA and the University of California system must
continue to look for solutions beyond unit-rearrangement and
lowering requirements to ensure that it does not turn into a
diploma mill.
But the responsibility lies as much with students as with
professors and the administration. Signing up Pass/No Pass for a
random GE class, taking the open-book midterm and e-mailing a
two-page paper to the professor is no different from taking the
same class at Columbia State University, so why bother? The quality
of one’s education depends on the amount of work invested in
it.
Forty-two completed classes and roughly $25,000 after I set foot
on this campus, I often ponder whether I had learned anything. Or
did I master the art of doing the least amount of work for the best
possible grade?
Were it not for a couple of outstanding professors, seminars and
elective classes, I almost succeeded in turning my academic
experience at UCLA into a diploma mill. And that is worth about as
much as a degree from Columbia State University.
