Dickinson State University - Criticism and Controversy

Criticism and Controversy

In 2011 and 2012, Dickinson State attracted negative attention for some of its academic and business practices. In 2011, the university was discovered to have overstated its enrollments by practices such as counting as "students" people who had merely attended a conference on the campus. This situation resulted in the dismissal of the university president, Richard J. McCallum.

A North Dakota University System audit report released in February 2012 found that the school had relaxed standards and waived some requirements to increase enrollment of foreign students and had, over a period of several years, awarded degrees to 584 foreign students who had not completed the required coursework. The report was a followup of an earlier meeting between Dickinson officials ant the Higher Learning Commission at which the DSU officials "realized they may have an issue with one or more of the HLC’s requirements surrounding academic agreements". Most of the university's foreign students came from China, where the university employed recruiting agents who falsely claimed to be university employees and sometimes misrepresented the university's programs. News media accounts described the audit report as depicting Dickinson State as a degree mill. The audit had been requested by the university's president, Douglas Coston, who took office in January 2012, after some university international agreements were found not to conform with requirements of the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education and the Higher Learning Commission. On the day of the audit release, the Dean of education committed suicide. Six months later, in July, Dickinson's regional accreditor placed the university "on notice," requiring the university provide detailed responses to concerns found in the accreditor's recent site visit.