Fraud U: Toppling a Bogus-Diploma Empire
wired.com
wired.com
In one statement to the INS I had to explain that: No - King's college Cambridge was not a community college.
As regards the INS: all I can say is that I sympathize.
I've seen this particularly with Eastern European countries and India.
Two quick anecdotes,
A girl I knew in High School came to the U.S. from Poland. Her father was a surgeon. The medical license and degrees weren't recognized here. He worked as a janitor at night while going to school (again) to qualify for the board exams.
I've noticed in many organizations that universities in India are sometimes viewed with suspicious as the quality of the output (in the IT field) can vary wildly. The ITTTs for example are considered fine, but there are hundreds of other schools that are very hard to get any visibility on. In a few disastrous cases I've seen, people were hired based on their 4 year degree in CS or IS or IT, yet they graduated without ever having written a single line of code! It becomes very hard to filter those people out without having a fairly extensive pre-interview screening process.
I have seen that first-hand. From my experience, H1B workers from India are very under-qualified. They are usually hired for their low pay demands not for exceptional knowledge. I don't want to start a flame war, this is just my experience, but the level of knowledge of some H1B employees is that of a someone taking a few community college courses. No theortical background. Most don't know what an algorithm is, instead they repeat a set of jargon IT words they read somewhere in a book.
While we are on the stereotyping bandwagon, I have noticed that programmers from Eastern Europe & former Soviet Block have a much better grasp of CS theory and math. Chinese programmers fall somewhere in between.
Again, downvote if you like, this is just what I observed, I don't know why that is and your experience will probably vary.
I've seen some absolutely stellar Indian hires though, but they really tended to come from the better, more established schools. A colleague of mine has been staffing her department heavily with Indian candidates not because the asking salary is cheaper, but because that just so happens to be where most of the candidates are coming from.
>instead they repeat a set of jargon IT words they read somewhere in a book
I've noticed the IT-jargon diarrhea as a pervasive problem on Indian resumes. Of the couple hundred or so resumes I've reviewed in the last six months, only the Indian ones had a section under each previous employer labeled "environment" followed by a list of every hot IT technology in the last 20 years. Sometimes to comical effect, "wow you worked in a place that used Cobol, Java Server Pages, Perl, Python, Ruby, AND Quantum Computing? And you list that you are an expert in the Waterfall Methodology AND RAD?".
I admire our immigrant population for coming to seek a better life and typically for their awesome work ethic. But sometimes the standard Resume Writing 101 course that seems to be taught at every Indian IT trade school does a disservice to them.
Now, my school is now infamously well known because of an unfortunate murder-suicide a few years back.
From the article, it appears like there are no laws saying you can't make an unaccredited university, and start issuing degrees. I may be wrong, but the charges seem to point that way.
The charges against him in the article were: * Conspiracy to commit {wire,mail} fraud * Bribing foreign officials
Conspiracy is what federal prosecutors go with when there's no actual crime committed, since it doesn't actually require a crime for a successful prosecution (only that several people intended to do something illegal). It's used as a stopgap to "get the bad guys", even when law isn't really there to support it. [for reference, check out the book '3 Felonies a Day']. The bribing of foreign officials obviously isn't directly related to the "fake" university.
So we go a step further, and look into if it even should be illegal. If I set up cschneid's Drive Through University, I will obviously never get accredited by a proper agency. But I'd probably argue that cschneid's Drive Through U should have free speech to print up paper saying people passed it's program, and have a degree showing that. No matter how bad that program is. It still should be illegal to lie about accreditation status, or similar (but that falls under existing misrepresentation and fraud laws).
I'd say that this argument is parellel to the Underwriter's Laboratory. The government does not mandate or require any electronics manufacturer to get certified by UL (afaik). But many environments require a UL seal to use any electronics, one example being the dorm I lived in. So it's a certification of quality, in the same way a university degree is a certification of quality for a person (by a 3rd party). Presumably, I'd be able to start my cschneid's laboratory, and certify whoever pays me for my logo. Why is that significantly different from a diploma mill?
I personally have a university degree, from an accredited school. But I dislike people taking social solutions (look up the degree & university in a database, say it's accredited), backed by existing laws (fraud, etc), and then turn it into a new set of laws, that restrict free speech. I think to sum up, if I want to hand out bad diplomas, that should be fine, as long as I'm truthful about it. Existing laws cover this environment well, and printing paper should not be an illegal act without an intent to defraud.
I didn't read anything in the article propose laws that would make unaccredited degrees illegal. What they said was there should be stricter standards for accreditation, overseen by the government. Right now some accreditation authorities are just organizations made up of a group of diploma-mill like universities who all agree to accredit each other.
For engineering positions in the US government, they usually require that your school be specifically accredited by ABET, which is legitimate. I remember them conducting inspections at my school while I was there to determine that our engineering labs met their requirements.
Basically, I'm saying that the government should stay out of it, unless it's actual fraud. It bothers me that it's a monopoly on the specific form of speech saying "this is a good school" and "this is a diploma".
I'm really coming from the stance of a wanna-be libertarian, I understand that the government must do things, but where possible, I think social and private-sector answers are more flexible, and less agressive towards various rights.
It just bothers me that I can't setup a legit-but-not-accredited school and issue diplomas without somebody potentially trying to come and get me, or prosecute me for wire fraud.
There's a nominal fee for each lookup, but considering the money to be saved in avoiding a bad hire, it's proven itself extremely worthwhile when doing final candidate vetting.
Most white collar jobs require a degree because everybody gets a degree, and anybody who doesn't go to college must be too stupid to to get one. Most people who want a shot at a middle classs life start out with $20 -30k in debt from college tuition alone. I don't think it's right that anybody who wants to do science or white collar work is expected to just give piles and piles of money to universities.
* I don't think they have any business with credit cards either. SS pursuing credit card fraud is a huge subsidy to the CC industry. Credit cards take 2-6% of every transaction and we all pay for catching people gaming the system.
* * Somebody's bound to post that the fake degrees lead to hiring people where safety's involved: Unless you know of something specific, don't say anything. I strongly suspect 99+% of the time when people bought a fake diploma were for white collar jobs where it wasn't necessary anyway.
That said, diploma mills only dilute this problem even further. It is up to the employer to set their standards. The issue is probably less about what is necessary to do the job and more about finding an honest employee who has the balls to try to prove he's worth the gamble despite not having the requested education.
A) Have a particular SAT score
B) Have a fairly high grade from an accredited organization.
I'd love to hear the results of that experiment, and see if there was any correlation between job performance and those two metrics.
My opinion on diploma mills is that they make it easier for liars and cheats to be more effective liars and cheats, so clamping down on them reduces the amount of lying and cheating in our society and that is a Good Thing.
My opinion on university degrees is that they have a slight correlation with brains but are not very good predictors. Some of the best people in IT that I've ever worked with never finished college. Including the programmer who mentored me at my start. (He never graduated because he was so good at his summer internship that they gave him a job offer he couldn't turn down.) I would therefore be delighted to hire the right non-college graduate. But not if they were the kind of person who thinks it OK to lie and cheat their way past the issue of not having a degree.
I have a feeling that the two of us won't agree on much. And the key difference is that you think that lying and cheating are OK while I don't.
In the grand scheme of things, $20-30k over 4 years is not a whole hell of a lot of money. And this is coming from somebody that paid for college out-of-pocket while supporting a wife (who couldn't work at the time and also was going to school) and earning less than $20k/yr. Leaving school with that kind of debt is almost inconsequential since you'll likely get a job that pays you well enough to live decently and pay back whatever debt you have with extra left over to eat steak.
Sure I had to suffer for a few (six) years to get my undegrad, but my first job out of school paid enough that I was able to live at a far better standard of living than I did during school, and still pay back the loans in about 4 years (and all the while, every year it got better and better as I got promotions and pay raises).
"Universities are the last medieval institutions, besides the Catholic church."
I went to Stanford and while it's true, the students did take classes where they heard facts, I didn't see anyone coming away from them having learned much. Instead, it just seemed like a test of whether you could stand it long enough / pay enough money before getting a piece of paper.
Despite having a BS in CS, I've still learned a lot about computer science at Stanford, and (thanks to the ridiculous amount TAs get paid here) I've had to pay very little for my degree.
Your experiences at Stanford might not be the same as everyone else's.
I think you're asking the wrong question. I think the better question is "are those jobs really that challenging and/or important that they require a university education?"
When nothing goes wrong, even the head of FEMA can have absolutely no background in emergency response.
Who's to say what a PhD program really entails? I understand that there are professional accreditation organizations. My question is simple: if I am the president of Newbonia, why can't I set up my universities to require 20 years of study before awarding a PhD? Or one year and a up-front payment of $30K? The implication here is that less studying and more bribery is always bad, but is that always the case? If you shaved 20% off the work of a "normal" PhD have you really defrauded anyone? How about 60%? If so, how about if you make your course more rigorous? If you made your programs require more work doesn't that now imply that other countries are defrauding their students?
If this is truly a multi-million-dollar business, and thousands of folks are getting these "fake" certifications, are there any stories of people who have been harmed by folks with fake diplomas? There was one case mentioned in the story -- a fake therapist. But I find that unconvincing. Where's the societal fallout from all this fakery? Is this a story about real people getting hurt by fake-accredited folks? Or is it a story about academics up in arms over people who got the same kind of degree without all the suffering they had to go through? It seems to me to be the latter. But I honestly don't know.
I'm a huge believer in education, although perhaps not formal certification programs, which I find too stilted and archaic. And I'm definitely no fan of people lying to each other. But I wonder if we haven't reached a point in many cases where the degree is just a bullshit piece of paper needed for job advancement. A social worker with a Master's degree is most likely not that far advanced over one with a 4-year degree. In fact, the one with the lesser degree might be much more effective in their job. It's just employers need something to differentiate the worker bees and degrees seem like a natural fit. It's stupid, the people who are asking for it know it's stupid, and the people who are getting it understand it's stupid too. On top of this, prices are going through the roof for these things. So people are just starting to treat it like the silliness that it is and buying their degrees off the internet.
Please don't think I am making a blanket case -- obviously a brain surgeon is not something you can fake. But for the 80% of cases? Where some external organization is requiring a piece of paper so you can move from line manager to section manager or something like that? If the cost continues to rise and the knowledge received isn't actually being put to use then diploma mills seem like a very natural and normal market response to me.