Are MUST University degrees legitimate

Answer 1

In the United States if a college is not listed with Council of Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) or United States Department of Education (USDA) there may be a serious issue with accreditation. Before you invest your money in an institution of higher learning make sure it is recognized by one of these agencies.

Must University says it is accredited by the International Accreditation Organization (IAO) which is considered an unrecognized and fake agency for online colleges according to Council on Higher Education Accreditation and the U.S. Department of Education in the Related Link below. Therefor use caution when dealing with it.

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I've heard their accreditation status has changed. Check with their website before making any decision.

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Remember, be wary of self-promoted dialogue. It's always best to refer to unbiased or neutral sources for information about any firm, education or otherwise.

Answer 2

Answer 1: A friend of mine is enrolled there and is studying to get his undergraduate degree. Must is an online university and you should look up how online education works. Students need to take classes and complete their courses before they are rewarded any degree. You need to look up how online education works lots of working adults are studying online these days.

Answer 2: Higher education, accreditation, distance learning, and identifying, fighting and helping law enforcement to prosecute degree/diploma mills are all areas of my consulting firm's expertise; and I've been doing it for pushing 40 years. I routinely engage degree/diploma millists, and call them on their fraudulent activities in many places such as this one, and in forums, and in comments beneath articles and blog postings, and in articles, etc. So I humbly request that the reader take, as seriously as a heart attack, what I herein write.

Answer 1, here, strikes me as millist apologia; and its language is consistent with the kind of planted-in-forums and in-press-releases misinformation about MUST that I see planted by MUST all over the place on the web. Do not believe a word of it. For starters, Answer 1 seems to be trying to make the reader think that the issue is whether or not online (as opposed to in-classroom) learning is legitimate. Law enforcement experienced in dealing with con artists and grifters call that "diversion," and it's a key tool that millists use to get degree-seekers thinking about, and worried about, the wrong things.

Online learning is completely legitimate. Even Harvard and Yale, now, offer entire degrees via online learning. And even old-fashioned through-the-mail correspondence courses, dating back to the 19th century, have, as long as they're from real and legitimate schools, always been legitimate. Heck, the University of London -- which is accredited by UK standards, even though the UK doesn't call it that; and the degrees from which are universally recognized by US schools, government and employers as legitimate and equivalent to US "regionally" accredited degrees -- has been offering entire degrees via distance learning since 1858. Such global luminaries as Nelson Mandela, and Bishop Desmond Tutu, H.G. Wells, and a long list of others all got their degrees by distance learning via University of London's now 150-something-year-old "external" program.

So, then, whether or not MUST is legitimate on account of its being an online alleged school isn't the issue. Again, Answerer 1's posting same is typical of a con artist's diversion. Completely legitimate schools offer online and other forms of distance learning degree programs. Online is completely legitimate; however, it has a bad reputation in the minds of some because while not all online schools are degree/diploma mills, all degree/diploma mills are online schools. And that's because, simply stated, it's a heck of a lot easier for a mill to create an impressive-looking website than it is for said mill to create an impressive-looking college campus in the real world. Those who don't really understand higher education, and online learning, will ignorantly posit that online schools are all degree/diploma mills. They are not... at least not simply on account of their being online. Whether or not they're mills depends on entirely different criteria, which I'm about to cover, herein.

MUST is, positively, a degree mill. Positively. Make no mistake about that.

I've investigated MUST extensively in the past; but even without doing that, it's very easy for at least someone with my kind of experience to see, just from its website, that it's a nefarious operation. I'm hesitant to list all the telltale signs here, though, because my so doing tends to provide the inexperienced reader with just enough information to then go out and get it wrong on other school websites. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and all that kinda' stuff.

It's far better and easier for the reader for me to simply point-out that MUST is not accredited, as academia in the United States understands that term. It's affiliations on its "Accreditation" web page are not accreditors, contrary to what their being on a page entitled "Accreditation" would tend to suggest... again, more millist suggestive tricks!

The two entities on MUST's "Accreditation" page are two of the most-commonly cited affiliations that mills and millists try to foist off on those who don't know any better as equivalent to accreditation. It is not. While both entities have some legitimacy, they're not accreditors. That they're on a web page entitled "Accreditation" on the MUST website is just part of the ruse... playing on the degree-seeker's suggestibility. Again, don't be fooled.

While it is true that not all unaccredited schools are also degree/diploma mills, it is positively true that all degree/diploma mills are unaccredited. And MUST is unaccredited. As it turns out, MUST is also a degree mill; but I concede that there are completely and provably credible schools out there which are unaccredited. So it's an "all thumbs are fingers, but all fingers are not thumbs" sort of thing: a school's being unaccredited does not necessarily mean that it's a degree/diploma mill.

The thing is, though, that no matter how provably good and credible is an unaccredited school, its credits tend to not be transferable to any other school -- especially accredited ones -- and its finished degrees tend not to be acceptable to accredited schools as requisite for entry into said accredited schools' higher-level degree programs. Additionally, nearly no employer will accept an unaccredited degree. Government professional licensing agencies will not accept an unaccredited degree. And there are states -- Oregon, for example, just to name one -- where it's literally criminally illegal to proffer an unaccredited degree on a resume or CV, or a job application, or on a business card or letterhead, or in advertising, or in articles, etc. Seriously: in some US states, you can actually be fitted with a pair of handcuffs by law enforcement for claiming an unaccredited degree.

It is, then, simply not worth it, no matter what, to fool around with unaccredited degrees...

...even though, yes, there are actually unaccredited schools out there that are legitimate and credible. Heck, in California, for example, there are unaccredited colleges/universities that offer various kinds of psychological counseling degrees which, when combined with adequate practica, are acceptable to California's various professional licensure boards which grant such as Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) licenses, or Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) licenses, and even licensed psychologist licenses. There are even some night-and-weekend and online law schools which are approved by California's Committee of Bar Examiners, but which are not accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA), that will qualify one to sit for California's bar exam. Go figure.

But such unaccredited schools are very rare; and their degrees are only valid for professional purposes in California (though there are some US states that will, after the law graduate of a California unaccredited law school has practiced in California for a few years, allow said graduate to sit for their bar exams... but the number of such states is small).

So, then, if the degree-seeker agrees with the basic principle that unaccredited degrees, even from provably credible schools, are just not worth the trouble, then not being ripped-off by the likes of MUST (which is not only unaccredited, but is also not credible, and is, positively, a degree mill) is easy.

All one need do is always take a mere 30 seconds to look-up any school in which one is considering enrolling in both the US Department of Education (USDE), and the USDE-sanctioned Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) online web databases.

You see, USDE and CHEA are the only entities in the United States which both can and do approve educational accreditors. If an educational accreditor is not USDE- and/or CHEA-approved, then it isn't really an accreditor. Period.

And neither of the entities claimed on MUST's "Accreditation" web page are USDE- or CHEA-approved accreditors. Period, again.

So, then, any school that is not in either or both of the USDE and/or CHEA online website databases is notaccredited. Period, a third time.

Bogus schools like MUST will claim that they're accredited; heck, some of them even create fake/bogus accreditors, and built impressive-looking websites for them, and then claim that they're accredited by them (and, of course, list themselves on the fake/bogus accreditor's website). Some of them even deliberately give the fake/bogus accreditor a name that's intentionally confusingly similar to the name of a real USDE- and/or CHEA-approved accreditor, just to throw-off uncareful degree-seekers.

So, then, no matter what a school says about itself on its website about whether or not it's accredited, never take it at face value. Always, always, always take a lousy 30 seconds (that's, seriously, all it takes) to look-up the school in question on the USDE and/or CHEA website (better to do it on both because there are a tiny handful of accreditors that are approved by one, but not the other); and if said school is not listed there, then it is positively not accredited.

So, then, if you buy-in to the notion that on should only bother to enroll in a school that's really and truly accredited by a USDE- and/or CHEA-approved agency, then avoiding degree/diploma mills like MUST becomes really easy; and takes only about 30 seconds... literally.

I've provided links to both the USDE and CHEA databases down the "sources and related links" area, below. However, I also, to make it easy to remember, created, years ago, some shortened links to them. We're not supposed to put URLs in the answers (we're supposed only put them in the "sources and related links" areas, but I'm sure the reader can figure out how to convert the following into real URLs in a browser:

The USDE database: tinyurl dot com forward slash usde dash database

The CHEA database: tinyurl dot com forward slash chea dash database

Yes, the actual links to them are below, in the "sources and related links;" and I don't mean to usurp the rules around here by sneaking the shortened ones into the main body of this answer; however, when one is shopping for an online school, and is having to keep checking the USDE and CHEA databases often, it sure is easier to remember the shortened URLs that I created. So I hope that admins around here will be patient and understanding with what I've just done.

Stay away from MUST! It's not only unaccredited, but it is positively a degree mill, too. It's alleged "courses" lack true academic rigor. It's degree requirements are inconsistent what those of legitimate and accredited schools. It's degrees and other credentials are absolutely worthless in the real worl. No employer will accept them, no matter what MUST claims on its website.

If MUST (or any other mill) offers-up the name of someone who's working at an impressive large company with a MUST degree, trust me when I tell you that said degree was not necessary to get the job. That's another of the tricks that mills do: They offer alleged proof that employers will accept their degrees by giving the name of someone who really does work for a big and impressive company, and who has one of the mill's fake/bogus degrees. But they don't tell you that said employee would have been able to get that job even without the mill's fake/bogus degree; in other words, either no degree was required to get the job, or the employee had a legitimate and accredited other degree which is what the employer actually accepted as requisite for employment.

Slick, eh? Remember that mills like MUST, and their millist owners, like all con artists have always been down through history, are very tricky. They know exactly how to fool people; and they use the ease of creating an impressive-looking website to make uncareful degree-seekers, who don't know how to protect themselves by only enrolling in accredited schools, and by verifying that schools are accredited by looking them up in the USDE and/or CHEA databases, think they're legit. Do not be fooled!