DEGREES OF SUSPICIONThe business is booming like never before, and some of its customers are college professors
Colloquy Live: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Alan Contreras, one of the few government officials fighting diploma mills, on what legitimate colleges should do about them.
In this report:
Article: Professors With Bogus Degrees
Article: What’s a Diploma Mill?
Multimedia: An interactive graphic showing the cozy connections between the operators of unaccredited colleges (Requires Flash, available free from Macromedia.)
Article: A One-Woman University
Article: The Hypnotist Who Married Lana Turner
Article: The University of Spam
Text: Excerpts from a telemarketing script used by one diploma mill
Article: Fighting FakeryBy THOMAS BARTLETT and SCOTT SMALLWOOD
One by one, thousands of brand-new graduates strode across stages this spring to receive a valuable document: a college diploma. It represents years of hard work and academic achievement. More important, lots of employers won’t even consider an applicant who doesn’t have a college degree.
Thousands of other people will also receive college diplomas this spring. But for them there will be no robes or speeches, no mortarboards or ceremonies. Instead of walking across a stage, they will open a mailbox. What they find there may look like a real college diploma. But is it? Perhaps they simply completed a multiple-choice exam or described their life experience. Maybe they did no more than dial a telephone number and fork over a couple of thousand dollars. Either way their diplomas do not represent much, if any, achievement.
By some estimates, diploma mills, as the purveyors of such degrees are often called, generate a half-billion dollars in revenue each year. Pinning down precise numbers is next to impossible, but selling degrees is clearly big business. In the late 1990s, one diploma mill, Columbia State University, raked in a million dollars a month before its owner was caught and jailed for fraud. An international diploma-mill ring that was the target of an investigation last year by the Federal Trade Commission is thought to have earned more than $100-million over several years.
This is not about low-rent hucksters churning out fake diplomas at Kinko’s. In fact, a three-month Chronicle investigation demonstrates that the diploma-mill industry is far larger, more sophisticated, and more intertwined with legitimate higher education than most people might imagine. In this upside-down version of academe, words like “university” and “doctorate” don’t mean what they do to the rest of us. Yet its graduates claim the same credentials on their résumés and often put familiar initials, like “Ph.D.,” after their names.
The Chronicle’s investigation uncovered many professors with fake or dubious degrees. We also found several professors with legitimate degrees who own or help run colleges unaccredited by federally recognized agencies. And we answer a question that has occurred to everyone with a computer: Where do all those spam messages -- the ones that shout “No classes! No tests! No one turned down!” -- come from? (Hint: Romania.)
In addition, we take a behind-the-scenes look at a well-known unaccredited university that is operated from the home of its president, and we explore the life of a hypnotist-turned-diploma-mill-owner who made millions running his university from a yacht off the coast of Mexico.
We also found that the proprietors of such institutions rarely operate alone. They can often be connected, like a bizarre game of “six degrees of separation,” through a series of underground universities or questionable accreditors.
Diploma mills have been around for a long time -- some experts trace their beginnings in the United States to the mid-19th century -- but their unprecedented growth in the past decade shows no sign of slowing.
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 50, Issue 42, Page A8
