DEGREES OF SUSPICIONColloquy 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: Inside the Multimillion-Dollar World of Diploma Mills
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 millBy THOMAS BARTLETT and SCOTT SMALLWOOD
They’re not quite the X-Men, but the small group of people doing battle with diploma mills might have come out of central casting. One is a former FBI agent. Another is a government bureaucrat. There’s the former president of an unaccredited university. And there’s the physics professor who is devoted to stamping out fake degrees.
They’ve even given themselves a name and a logo right out of the comic books: the Carpmasters. (Get it? They’re fishing for bottom-feeding pests.)
Because no coordinated government effort exists to combat diploma mills, these compatriots have become the go-to experts on the subject. They meet occasionally, but generally they coordinate their investigations through phone calls and e-mail messages.
Going after diploma mills is just a small part of Alan Contreras’s job as director of Oregon’s Office of Degree Authorization. Even so, his vigilance has made him the country’s leading government watchdog on unaccredited higher education. He is quoted often in the news media, gets calls from people all over the world checking on dubious institutions, and has testified before a U.S. Senate committee. His office’s Web site (http://www.osac.state.or.us./oda) provides the most comprehensive list of diploma mills available.
Under Oregon law, using a diploma-mill degree to get a job is illegal. “Helping people make good decisions about what is a college and what isn’t is rewarding,” he says. “The flip side is that I get a lot of letters from lawyers. No one likes to hear that their degree isn’t any good.”
For George Gollin, exposing fake universities isn’t a job. It’s a relaxing pastime. When Mr. Gollin, a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is stumped by a particularly thorny physics problem, he takes a break by investigating a diploma mill. He has become an expert on several clusters of operators, and he regularly sends out e-mail messages to the Carpmasters and others, updating them on what he has found.
“Part of my worldview is that we have to decide when it’s appropriate to intervene when there are harmful things happening in the world,” says Mr. Gollin, a self-described “goody-goody” who became interested in the issue because of the spam he would receive from diploma mills. “This is corrupt activity. ... That got me to stick with it.”
Learning From Within
In nearly every article written about diploma mills, John Bear offers his pithy quotes. He is best known for Bear’s Guide to Earning Degrees by Distance Learning, which regulators themselves use when faced with an institution that they haven’t heard of. What often goes unmentioned is that Mr. Bear himself has been involved with several institutions that Mr. Contreras, at least, now considers diploma mills. He once served as president of Greenwich University, was part of the founding of Fairfax University, and worked with Columbia Pacific University two decades ago.
Though he no longer owns stock in any unaccredited university, Mr. Bear remains a proponent of distance education and tells people that they should study the issue carefully before deciding whether an unaccredited institution meets their needs. He says that when he was involved with the unaccredited institutions, they were reputable, and that he cannot be responsible for any subsequent changes they made.
Mr. Contreras does not believe that Mr. Bear’s background makes him any less credible now. “I can’t imagine a better way of learning how these operate than being involved in unaccredited institutions in the past,” the Oregon official says. “Does it mean people look at John and say, ‘Hmmm?’ Sure. Do I see that as a big issue? No.”
Allen Ezell, another of the Carpmasters, took time off from his job as a corporate security manager to write a book on the diploma-mill industry with Mr. Bear. Mr. Ezell, a former FBI agent, once led a task force called Dipscam, which shut down dozens of diploma mills in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Simply catching the carp, though, may not be enough.
“It would be good to shut them down, but they will instantly open up somewhere else,” Mr. Contreras says of individual operators. “They will go to Africa, they will go to the Isle of Man, they will move outside the country. You can’t stop that.”
The key, he says, is to dry up the demand for such degrees, by making it illegal to use them to get jobs or promotions. That’s essentially what laws in Oregon, New Jersey, and North Dakota do. Other states may be coming around to that strategy, Mr. Contreras says. Among the calls he gets about whether individual institutions are diploma mills have been inquiries from officials in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Nevada, who are considering adopting regulations similar to Oregon’s. And the U.S. Department of Education has proposed creating an official list of all accredited universities, to make it easier for prospective students to distinguish the carp from a good catch.
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 50, Issue 42, Page A17
