Readers are invited to submit their preferred name for a diploma mill(obvious jokes about Harvard will be trated with casual scorn).

How about Yale?

Einstein's basement

451 Degrees (for Bradbury fans)

A for no effort

Graduate While You Wait

Doctorates for Bachelors

Bush and Kerry Club

Does Bush's Harvard MBA and Yale BS (heh..BS!) count as phony?

Top Officials have Phony Degrees - (CBS) 5/10/04
"Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles Abell has a master's from Columbus University, a diploma mill Louisiana shut down. Deputy Assistant Secretary Patricia Walker lists among her degrees, a bachelor's from Pacific Western, a diploma mill banned in Oregon and under investigation in Hawaii.

CBS News requested interviews with both officials. The Pentagon turned us down, saying, "We don't consider it an issue."

But using such a degree is a crime in some states. Alan Contreras cracks down on diploma mills for Oregon, a state that's taken the lead on this issue.

"You don't want somebody with a fake degree working in Homeland Security," says Contreras. "You don't want somebody with a fake degree teaching your children or designing your bridges."

But we found employees with diploma mill degrees at the new Transportation Security Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Departments of Treasury and Education, where Rene Drouin sits on an advisory committee. He has degrees from two diploma mills including Kensington University.

Kensington was forced out of business by officials in California and Hawaii. Another Kensington alum, Florida State Rep. Jennifer Carroll, just stepped down from the National Commission on Presidential Scholars.

Both Carroll and Drouin say they worked hard and thought their degrees were legitimate.

"The students are being sold a bill of goods that really don't help them at all," the insider says. "There are slick people out there, and it's happening every day, every minute probably somewhere in America."

And taxpayers have paid for bogus degrees some workers used for hiring, promotions and raises."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/10/eveningnews/main616664.shtml

jjj - thanx. That's incredible. "..don't consider it an issue." That's the line I used when Dad found a helmet in my wallet. Didn't work then, either.

If you buy that, I've got a bridge for sale. The papers look pretty legit. Bought them from a professor at "CCNY-Brooklyn".

Looks like there is a profit opportunity for some detective agency to offer the service of verifying that degree-granting institutions exist, and that the individual actually got the degree that they are claiming. The detective agency could sell that service to anyone who wanted to check, such as auditors, agencies conducting security clearances, employers verifying credentials, grad schools verifying credentials, the press, etc.

Probably not the ideal blog to raise the issue in, but the federal government really does over-demand educational certification. Most federal agencies simply won't look at an applicant who does not sport at least a BS/BA for any job above gardener. Many put their cut-off at an MS/MA.

This, I suspect, is a simple reaction to grade inflation, but leads to two evils. The first, as noted, is the temptation toward bogus degrees. The second is that by using inappropriate filters, the process keeps qualified people out of jobs.

It would be interesting to track back the real degree v. bogus degree record of highly-placed federal employees back to the 1960s, perhaps to the '50s to establish a baseline.

Require a degree from an accredited school. End of problem.

Suggested bogus degreees:

MBA from the Proudhon School of Market Economics

MFA from the Tristan Tzara Institute of Classical Art

PhD in Corporate Governance from the Ken Lay School of Management Studies

MA in Queer Theory from the Rush Limbaugh School for Women

Accreditation in Media Fairness from The Matt Drudge Institute of Journalistic Ethics

Yikes 'Here It Comes Again!

John makes an excellent point. A Bachelor's Degree nowadays seems like simply a certification that the individual holding it has sat still for an amount of BS comparable to what they'll collect doing the work.

Unless there's a parallel attempt to determine whether or not the people with bogus degrees are less competent at the actual job than those with "real" sheepskins, this is just another Okie Law designed to keep the riffraff out of the privileged domains of the elite.

Regards,
Ric Locke