In defiance of the best science and academic consensus of our day?

The Christian fairy tale courses at BYU might even transfer to other universities. Mormon-specific fairy tales almost certainly will not transfer.

BTW, there are many dozens of accrediting agencies that universities deal with. For example, the American Dietetic Association accredits the registered dietician program at BYU. They couldn't care less about a BoM course. Asking whether a university is accredited is an almost meaningless question. You need to ask by whom, and for what.

Doesn't Notre Dame do the same thing???

Though there is -some- historicity to the Bible/Torah, when you take the mystical parts out of it I guess.

The US Dept. of Education does not accredit institutions; that's done by private agencies.

http://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/

The accrediting agency creates the standards, in collaboration with the government.

http://www2.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/accreditation_pg2.html

Apparently, private religious colleges and universities can teach any doctrines they wish because they are "private" institutions. (Of course, they still get some government money and students still get government financial aid to go there. Go figure).

As to the larger issues of quality of education and academic freedom, BYU has repeatedly been in trouble and has sometimes come close to failing the standards and losing accreditation.

BYU is currently accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities.

It would be interesting to see if there are any Morg ties to that commission.

BYU has often been on the edge of losing accreditation. Steve Benson has a wall of text somewhere detailing it.

i agree with the original post.

i think that discrimination against gays should be another reason.

i think that discrimination against exmormons is another reason.

i also think that because the required religion classes are ENTIRELY devotional and without academic rigor, they shouldn't be applied to an accredited degree.

I don't think the accreditation process evaluates an institution in anything other than the specific area of accreditation. If the institution is being examined in an area such as an engineering program the fact that the school is run by homophobic racist religious whack jobs is really relevant to the process. In other words, I don't think there is a 'nice guy' check box on the list.

i'm sure you're right.

i do think that i have a point about about giving college credits for religious classes that are purely devotional. there is a way to have academic rigor in religious studies, but it certainly does not happen at byu. i took many hours of required religious courses at byu, and was never taught a single true thing about mormon history, BOM, or the bible. it was simply lie after lie. i learned more reading a single chapter of Quinn's Early Mormonism, and the Magic World View, than i did from all my byu religion classes combined.

This prompted me to recheck the accreditation of my sons' colleges, and sure enough they are WASC accredited.

http://www.wascsenior.org/


WASC is the gold standard of accreditation, at least in the west. (Isn't Utah in the west?). Any graduate program would accept a student who went to a WASC college.

BYU-Hawaii is accredited by WASC, and the University of Utah is not. So that would seem to indicate that Utah is not in the geographic region accredited by WASC.

Usually a university is accredited by a regional organization. Then, different Colleges (law, business, education, etc.) are accredited by their specific accreditation organization