university scholarship

[whatarelie]

The message below was sent to me, please I wish to confirm if it is a scam, though i applied to the university and I received the e mail below from USLA Admissions <admissions@usla.edu>

"Thank you for your recent degree application to the University of SouthCentral Los Angeles.

After careful consideration, we are happy to extend our formal offer of acceptance to you, with details as such included below;

To access your offer in PDF format, please follow the link. Your user name and password are included. (you should type these rather than copy paste)

<http://www.usla.edu/student/scholarship-offer.pdf>



After reading through the offer, if you wish to proceed with enrolment, please return the ‘student-confirmation’ form attached. (note. the attachment is in .zip format which you will need to save and click to open).

We have also attached a FAQ document which should go some way to answering any questions you have.

Please note, we have recently changed our course offering (for new students only) and if you previously had chosen a different degree we apologise that this is no longer offered.

We look forward to hearing from you.
- - - - - - -
USLA Admissions
University of SouthCentral Los Angeles Inc. "

The attachment was empty, this is the reason of my curiosity

thanks.

[John Fairheart]

The message below was sent to me ... though i applied to the university and I received the e mail below ... The attachment was empty, this is the reason of my curiosity

If the email came from an EDU that you had applied to, don't you think that you should be asking THEM? Considering that the email is not spam, nor uncolicited, why would you simply come here with a link to a PDF file that nobody here can possibly access.

Seriously, contact the support department of the education department you are dealing with.

[Nyla]

Frankly, I'm suspicious. The .edu sites are reserved for a certain type of accredited school since 2001.

Starting on October 29, 2001, only post-secondary institutions and organizations that are accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies are eligible to apply for a .edu domain.[2] Most such agencies accredit only US institutions, so very few non-US institutions qualify, and .edu remains almost exclusively a top-level domain of the United States.

Note that the current eligibility requirements apply only to new applicants. Several non-qualifying institutions retain their .edu domains obtained before the current rules came into force.

Examples of these include Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, a public secondary school at imsa.edu; Stuyvesant High School, a public secondary school at stuy.edu; Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a public secondary school at tjhsst.edu; and Phillips Exeter Academy, a private secondary school at exeter.edu.

But the domain seems to have been registered before that date, and there is some UK information associated with it as technical contact, which seems odd.

Domain Name: USLA.EDU

Registrant:
University of Southcentral Los Angeles
10 University Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90310
UNITED STATES

Administrative Contact:

Admin, DNS
IP Holdings S.A.
Office 264, 77 Beak Street, Soho
London W1F 9ST
UNITED KINGDOM
+44 (0)751 352 5547
ip_holdings_sa@yahoo.com

Technical Contact:

Admin, DNS
IP Holdings S.A.
Office 264, 77 Beak Street, Soho
London W1F 9ST
UNITED KINGDOM
+44 (0)751 352 5547
ip_holdings_sa@yahoo.com

Name Servers:
NS1.USLA.EDU 72.167.61.100
NS2.USLA.EDU 72.167.122.19

Domain record activated: 25-Sep-1995
Domain record last updated: 12-Jan-2008
Domain expires: 31-Jul-2009


More worrying, they seem to be claiming to be more "endorsed" and "accredited" than they should be given credit for. They are, for example, claiming to be accredited by an official sounding organization that turns out to be a Google Group.

See http://www.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?t=29398

Also, why would they be posting your "scholarship offer" as a plain old direct-linked pdf? That indicates that they aren't creating tailored scholarship offers, every student will see the exact same offer. That isn't a personalized URL, and if they're giving everyone the same offer, why hide it behind a login?

I work at an American institution of higher learning in the IT department. I work intimately with our financial aid department. Believe you me, they would NEVER put a student's financial aid offer on the site as just a plain old, generic, directly-linked PDF, even if it were hidden behind a login.

I expect this could be a paper degree that may not be accepted by some employers or other schools.

[Nyla]

Someone claiming to represent USLA has sent me a PM. They supplied a link to the following list of schools. http://www.bppve.ca.gov/forms_pubs/voluntaryagreelist.pdf

To clarify what I said above, I meant the school appears to be currently unaccredited, or, in other words, there's no guarantee that other schools would automatically accept credits earned there. (I realize, some people also refer to "buy a college degree with no classes taken" offers as "paper degrees". That wasn't the intent of my statement above.) If you plan on taking classes at USLA and transferring the credits elsewhere, I would suggest finding out if they would be accepted or if you would need to go through an appeals process. But I would suggest that with any school. There are legitimate institutions that offer educational opportunities and do not pursue accreditation, but accreditation is something of a litmus test for some institutions, particularly graduate schools. Some employers will also disregard degrees or credits from unaccredited universities. From what I can find, civil service/government jobs often exclude degrees from unaccredited institutions.

It's possible the school is in the process of being accredited. If so, they can supply that information here directly or provide it to me and I'll post it. Applying for accreditation doesn't necessarily guarantee accreditation.

The list they provided contains schools eligible for a voluntary agreement regarding postsecondary and vocational schools. I've asked the person who contacted me to supply further information on accreditation(s), if available. The institution does not appear to be on the list of accredited institutions at http://www.ope.ed.gov/accreditation/Search.aspx for example. But, some lists of accredited universities and schools don't list two year colleges and community colleges, either.

The person who contacted me didn't address the question of why the link to what you termed your "scholarship offer" wasn't in any way personalized. They stated it was behind a login because the institution's financial/banking information is on it. I don't think it odd that an institution would put a scholarship offer behind a login. I do still think it rather odd that they would have their own financial information on the offer and have the information on a static PDF. Neither of those things is standard practice at the institutions of higher learning I'm familiar with.

As always, I've told the representative that they're more than welcome to post their side of the story here. The representative seems to have the idea that I've called them a scam in my post above, so just to be quite clear, nowhere did I state they were a scam. Just that they don't appear to be (based on what I can find in a search) an accredited university and the .edu designation doesn't guarantee an accredited university if the domain was registered prior to 2001.

[Nyla]

This link and the application itself may go some way to explaining the mystery of why the scholarship offer is static, at least.

http://www.usla.edu/admissions/study-scholarships.html

That seems to imply that a scholarship student will be paying the same price for a degree and that the scholarship is not scaled according to financial need or scholastic achievement.

Presumably, the offer may contain financial information to allow the student to pay the balance by bank transfer. Hopefully the representative will confirm that interpretation if it's correct.