MAKE-BELIEVE EDUCATIONS Internet boosts sales of fake degrees

Two degrees with honors cost about $1,500 at a diploma mill.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
In their quest for college degrees, some students spend semester after semester in lecture halls, write exhaustive term papers and cram for arduous exams.
Others just send money to an Internet site and receive a fake transcript in the mail.
Scores of diploma mills offer degrees based on "life experience" or other questionable criteria, giving pretenders ready access to valuable but vacant credentials. And at least once in a while, such make-believe educations are duping gullible employers.
"The reason why people buy fake degrees is because they work," said Richard Douglas, a Virginia doctoral candidate who is studying employers' knowledge of diploma mills.
The growth of the Internet has been a boon for degree sellers -- allowing them to advertise anonymously and create the illusion that they are as legitimate as real schools, said John Bear, an author of several education guidebooks who has tracked diploma mills for more than two decades.
He estimates that there are 200 such businesses operating currently, with sales of more than $200 million a year.
A recent report from the U.S. General Accounting Office illustrates the reach of fake degrees.
GAO investigators posed as Susan M. Collins, an imaginary medical technology worker, to purchase diplomas from Degrees-R-Us, a company that advertises online and that they had identified as a diploma mill.
The sting operation
They bought a bachelor of science degree in biology, dated June 13, 1975, and a master's degree dated June 10, 1988, in Collins' name -- both from Lexington University, a nonexistent school purportedly in Middletown, N.Y.
Among the fictitious academic accomplishments for Collins: She received an A in Introduction to Sociology; Bs in both Spanish I and Spanish II; and an overall grade-point average of 3.80.
The GAO paid $1,515 for a package that included Collins' two diplomas, honors distinctions and a telephone verification service. That service made it possible for potential employers to check information about her transcript and confirm that she'd been awarded the degrees.
Degrees-R-Us' owner, a disbarred Las Vegas lawyer, subsequently told the GAO that he sells diplomas only for "self-esteem purposes" and not to fill employment requirements.
The agency referred the company to the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Postal Service for more investigation.
The GAO also tried to learn how prevalent fake diplomas are on workers' resumes.
Investigators scanned a government-sponsored r & eacute;sum & eacute; database and discovered more than 1,200 applicants who listed degrees from diploma mills. About 200 of them held "positions of trust and responsibility."
Bear said it's difficult to determine whether buyers of "life experience" degrees are full-fledged liars out to deceive their bosses or merely victims who believe a diploma mill's hype.
Dignified names
The degree mills often tout conservative-sounding names, claim to have accreditation and require buyers to list their job experiences that will add up to a diploma.
That could be enough to fool some students who are interested in online courses or other legitimate alternatives to traditional colleges, Bear said.
They also can dupe employers who fail to inspect job candidates' credentials, Douglas said.
Douglas, an AT & amp;T corporate trainer, surveyed about 270 human resources professionals about which institutions' degrees they deemed acceptable.
Of the 12 "schools" that he presented them, some were valid colleges and some were diploma mills that weren't accredited by any legitimate agency.
The result: Employers were more likely to approve institutions that sounded real than those that were real, Douglas said.
"If you have a degree from a funny-sounding school that people do not recognize, I guess you get put in the do-not-consider pile," Douglas said.
"With diploma mills, they tend to be very staid, very traditional-sounding. The whole point is to give some semblance of dignity."
That poses little trouble to graduates of Ivy League universities or other well-known colleges.
But it may concern students from legitimate colleges that aren't named after dead U.S. presidents or British cities, said Douglas, whose own doctorate will come from Cincinnati-based Union Institute and University.