Book Review - Walston's Guide

Walston's Guide to Christian Distance Learning, by Rick Walston, president of Columbia Evangelical Seminary, is an incredibly useful tool and should be consulted by everyone considering a DL school for ministry preparation.

Now in its 5th edition, Walston's Guide continues its history of clarifying what distinguishes good schools from bad ones, and all that is in between.  Particularly helpful is chapter 2, in which Walston gives his "10 Commandments of Judging a School."  The 10 questions he asks here provide helpful guidance in evaluating a school, especially unaccredited ones.  On the issue of accreditation, Walston makes a good case for the meaninglessness of accreditation through an accrediting agency that is not recognized by the US Dept. of Education.

Walston's book makes several important distinctions that students need to be aware of.  First, he makes the point that an unaccredited school is by no means necessarily a poor quality school, and that an accredited school is not necessarily a good one.  Quality of education, sound faculty, employing generally accepted academic standards and honesty are what matters the most in terms of quality (but not necessarily acceptance by employers).  Second, Walston coined the term "cullege" as a tertium quid between diploma mills that basically grant degrees based on no or little work and are illegal, and good schools that are legal and use generally accepted academic standards.  Culleges, in contrast to diploma mills, are legal (and may be accredited by one of the many unrecognized accreditors), but are truly substandard in their demands on students and therefore are a joke as well.   The term "cullege" is a combination of the words college  and cull, which is "Something picked out or removed from others, especially something rejected because of inferior quality" (page 24).

With distance-learning exploding across the globe due to the World Wide Web, students need guidance on sorting out the good from the bad.  Walston's Guide provides that and more.  For me, it has prompted a change of schools.  More on that later.