wauc international accreditation

According to Ms. Asher, American World now enrolls more than 7,000 students, including about 2,000 in China. In some countries, students attend classes rather than complete the entire program through distance education, she says. Tuition varies with the country, but students in the United States pay $1,800 per degree.

When they apply, students submit transcripts and résumés, and Ms. Asher gives them credits toward their degrees for their life experience. All students complete some type of thesis or dissertation, she says, and papers are graded by “consultant faculty members.” Students work in their native languages, and instruction is entirely “individualized,” she adds. “If the guy is in Indonesia, I’m not going to ask him to do a paper on Abraham Lincoln.”

Her university has had plenty of detractors. Her application for a license in Louisiana was rejected, and state law changes in Iowa and South Dakota prompted her to move the university repeatedly. The company is now based in Mississippi. In Hawaii the state sued her for not stating clearly that American World was not accredited by a recognized accreditor. She lost a $125,000 judgment.

The Hawaii case was simply a silly vendetta, she says, since she never has had a student from Hawaii. Indeed, fewer than 10 percent of her students are from the United States. About 1,000 are in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a couple of hundred are in Germany, and another hundred in South Korea, she says. She just signed up a new foreign representative to handle students in Sudan and Syria.

It was the apparent expectations of all those foreign students that scared away Alanna Shaikh. She was finishing a master’s degree in public health and living in Iowa City in 2000 when the employment agency she was working with assigned her to American World as an office temp.

At the time the business was housed in an office building there, sharing space with an H&R Block office and a manicurist. When Ms. Shaikh arrived, she found three desks and a conference room that seemed to be rarely used. She lasted just one day, making photocopies and doing some filing. At first, she says, the operation seemed “pretty sketchy.”

Ms. Asher offered to hire her, Ms. Shaikh says, with a job grading papers and running the office: “She told me I just needed to read them and put some marks in the margins. She thought I could do the science papers as well.”

WAUC was a website of the organization owned by Maxine Klein Asher August 15, 1930, – May 19, 2015,)  It was the hub of American World University, an unaccredited institution with more than 7,000 students around the globe which was commonly considered to be a diploma mill.

In 1993 she founded the World Association of Universities and Colleges, an accrediting service unrecognized by the U.S. Department of Education, that gave its imprimatur to a host of alternative institutions. Almost every day Columbus University and Lacrosse University, both of which are considered diploma mills by some government regulators, advertised in the back pages of USA Today. In bold type, they tout their accreditation from the association. That made Ms. Asher a central figure in the shadowy world of unaccredited higher education.

The route to her career as a world explorer began in Chicago, where Ms. Asher was born. Her family moved to Southern California, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles. She became a public-school teacher, got married, and had three daughters. She later returned to college, earning a master’s degree in ancient history from California State University at Northridge.

That’s when the Atlantis bug bit her. In 1973, at age 42, she led a research expedition to search for the legendary civilization off the coast of Spain.

As she told a New York Times reporter at the time: “I simply know we will find it because I am psychic. Oh, God, how strong the vibrations are these days, and I know that the highly civilized people of Atlantis also were very psychic.”

That expedition didn’t work out as planned. “We got involved in a Communist-Fascist squeeze play for control of Spain,” she says.

She dodged murder attempts and a kidnapping, she says: “Somebody wanted to end this whole thing.” A screenplay of the story — she is looking for financing to make a thinly fictionalized account of her Atlantis research — is chock-full of these adventures, she says. It’s such tales that prompted the “female Indiana Jones” label she frequently cites. In the end, Ms. Asher says, she escaped her captors in Spain by jumping from a speeding car.

She founded American World to provide distance education that combines American ideas about higher education with Europe’s more tutorial model, she says. Ms. Asher was a holder of a doctorate in education from Walden University and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Granada, in Spain, both of which are accredited by government-approved agencies. In the early days she advertised in the International Herald Tribune, struggling to enroll students.

Then she hit on the idea of hiring representatives in various countries for American World, paying them 50 percent of the tuition they brought in. In return, they handle local advertising and other costs. “Fifty percent of something is better than nothing,” she says.