The University of Atlanta, formerly known as Barrington University, is a private for-profit distance education institution. Investigations by the State of Vermont in 1995 and the State of Alabama in 2000 concluded it to be a diploma mill. In 2008 Alabama education officials described it as not a "real" school.
History
Operation as Barrington University
The University of Atlanta was founded as Barrington University (not to be confused with Barrington College) in the early 1990s by Robert and Steven Bettinger. By 1995, it was operating out of a Burlington, Vermont, address offering distance-learning degrees. The school lacked state approval. In Vermont, it is a crime for an unaccredited college to offer degrees. In 1995, the state successfully sued and fined Barrington for fraud. The state's investigation revealed that the physical campus was a rented post office box. The school was claiming that its degrees would raise buyers' lifetime earnings by $1 million. Barrington then moved to Mobile, Alabama, offering $4,450 degrees granting considerable credit for life experiences.
Barrington operated as a subsidiary of Boca Raton-based Virtual Academics. The company's literature claimed that its chairman had a doctorate and a master's degree; an investigation showed that he had neither. Barrington also claimed accreditation by the International Association of Universities and Schools Inc. (IAUS). However, a 2003 investigation by the South Florida Business Journal revealed this was a for-profit corporation set up in Florida (not Switzerland or Washington, D.C., as claimed) by Virtual Academics' chairman, Robert Bettinger, and the owner of another for-profit college in 1998. According to the New York Post, they did this to avoid further problems due to their schools' lack of accreditation. The IAUS' charter was subsequently dissolved by the State of Florida for failure to pay annual registration fees. The South Florida Business Journal also reported that Barrington was paying professors and schools in China commissions to sell Barrington degrees to Chinese students; this revelation caused a major drop in Chinese enrollments and a resulting decline in revenues. Virtual Academics then changed its name to Cenuco and announced its intention to focus on wireless products; according to the South Florida Business Journal, this was due to the adverse publicity associated with the chairman's missing doctorate and the Chinese enrollment problem.
The school began having problems with the State of Alabama as early as 2000. The state threatened to revoke its operating license. State investigators determined that Barrington had been operating out of the offices of a secretarial and answering service.
A General Accounting Office investigation found that Barrington was offering degrees for a fee based solely on life experience and requiring no classroom experience. By 2008, the State of Alabama was conducting a crackdown on such schools operating in Alabama, requiring that all be accredited or actively seeking accreditation by October.
Establishment and operation as University of Atlanta
In 2008, while still operating in Mobile, Barrington changed its name to the University of Atlanta. The university also received accreditation from the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC).
In early 2012, the University of Atlanta's accreditor, the DETC, announced that the school had stopped enrolling new students and that its accreditation would expire on June 30, 2013. Until then, the university's DETC accreditation is applicable only to the "teach-out" of current students and the university was reported as no longer accepting new enrollments.
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Affiliations
The University of Atlanta is authorized by the Georgia Nonpublic Postsecondary Education Commission. It is a member of the European Association for Distance Learning and American Council on Education. In 2008, it became affiliated with the United States Department of Defense's Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support (DANTES), but does not appear in the DANTES catalog as of January 2014. The university is accredited with premier status by the Accreditation Service for International Colleges (ASIC) in the United Kingdom.
Degrees
As of 2009, the University of Atlanta granted Bachelor of Science (BSc) and Master of Science (MSc) degrees in the fields of business, social science, computer science, and education and healthcare administration. It offers Master of Business Administration (MBA) and Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) with concentrations in administration, finance, international business, marketing, human resource management, management information systems, computer science, educational leadership, and criminal justice.
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