How Prevalent are Bogus Degrees?

Paul Townend asks: "The BBC are reporting that a US government investigation has found that 28 top federal employees possess bogus college degrees (usually based on 'life experience'), and the phenomenon may be much bigger. Have Slashdot readers come across or worked with people with such degrees? Does it give them an advantage? What happens when they're discovered?"

Comments

Shows

[u-238]

how much the actual acedemic drudgery is truly necessary for doing the job that requires the degree.

Re:Shows

[BoomerSooner]

Bullshit, it shows they are liars and will probably be fired and sued for the overcompensation they received. If they were qualified without the "fake" degree why didn't they apply that way?

Because you get paid based on your experience and education. It's simple fraud.

GW isn't a good example of a Yale education either.

Re:Shows

[GigsVT]

If they were qualified without the "fake" degree why didn't they apply that way?

Because a lot of jobs require degrees for no reason.

I don't see how you can call it "overcompensation".

If they weren't doing the job they were hired to do, then they should have been fired for poor performance.

If they were doing the job well enough to command their compensation without getting fired, then that proves the degree is bullshit, by your own argument.

Re:Shows

[kabocox]

Bullshit, it shows they are liars and will probably be fired and sued for the overcompensation they received. If they were qualified without the "fake" degree why didn't they apply that way?

You must be new to the US. The way things work are HR writes an impossible requirements page. Recent grads. with no work but lots of classroom experience, put as many buzz words in and get their resume padded that way. People that have been working for 10 years, but don't have anything other than a HS diploma if that just put down what they've done. Here is news for you: HS drop outs can make alot more money than PhD folks. On average they don't, but they can if they have the drive and skills. PhD folks rarely make good employees. They've just spent way too much time in school getting "educated" to be useful to society in anything but a research setting. HS drop outs are usually of no better use to society than janitors and min. wage employees. I'll let you in on a secret. There are people that have made millions without a degree of either HS or College.

Re:Shows

[nelsonal]

There is a signficant school of thought that believes that degrees (or any certification for that matter) is a signal to potential employeers that you have the determination to achive something difficult and the training invested in you will not go to waste. The hypothsis is also used to explain why bank signs and facades are quite expensive to produce. Since a sign is emblazened with a company's name it will not carry much use if the bank were to go under. Since the management team was willing to spend so much on a sign, they are capitalized well enough to be around for a while and not go under with your deposits (this was pre FDIC insurance). I think this is the vast majority of the extra value of an prestigous degree (let's face it if you try you can learn plenty from any undergraduate institution). Almost anyone can be trained to do most jobs (engineering, medical, and a few other no mistake jobs excluded) competently. The important part is the expense undertaken by the employeer to train someone. The degree shows that you are willing to endure some discomfort and effort to achive a long term goal. As such they are very, very costly signals, but no one has found a better method of sorting people.

Re:Shows

[cmowire]

See, there's a difference between "padding your resume with keywords" and a fake degree. One's trying to defeat the keyword filter in an HR system, the other is outright lying.

The problem with your opinion is that there are some folks who didn't graduate from HS, College, or both who have made millions. Bill Gates is one of them. But, on the average, a dropout isn't going to make as much money as somebody who got the BS. But that doesn't mean that the other 99.9% of folks who didn't "finish their education" are particularly brilliant.

By drawing a sharp line between a PhD and a grade school education, you are confusing the issue. Most businesses don't care about a PhD, they generally care about folks with a bachleurs or a masters and that's about it.

Re:Shows

[cmowire]

Don't know what your experience is, but life showed me that you can't quantify people.

I've seen folks with a BS or even an MS from great schools who couldn't code their way out of a box. I've seen bright folks who had such obnoxious personalities that nobody wants to work with them. I've seen folks with a PhD in random off-the-wall fields with no "useful" degrees who can both code well and manage people. I've seen grads from great schools with no common sense. I've seen folks who didn't graduate and got a plum job and then had problem years down the road when they were trying to find a new job and the market wasn't the same as before so they couldn't. I've torn apart folks in an interview because they didn't know anything about the words they stuffed in their resume. I've seen excellent artists getting in trouble in art schools because they didn't stretch their own canvas or used computers or such things.

There could be a variety of reasons why your brothers are doing better than you are other than education.

Re:Shows

[AlecC]

Did black America suddenly turn around and get its shit together while I wasn't looking?

Yes. A lot, but not all, did. Social background and education are much more informative than skin colour. If you factor these two terms in, you have already used all the information given by skin colour; if you add skin colour in, you are effectively double counting. And these other measures are more efficient: they allow you to drop white dropouts and bring in brilliant blacks.

It is true that if you had no other information at all, skin colour would have some predictive value. But if you have the information available on any normal resume, skin colour tells you nothing more than you know already.

Statistics for black people only tell you an average for about 20 million people, exactly one of whome you are interviewing at this moment. They are about as useful as statistics for the 20 million people in the same height band.

equivalence systems

[perlchild]

Lots of universities have some kind of system to accreditate "life experience" when relevant, to pre-graduate students. There are also lots of "honorary" doctorates going around. But do degrees as job requirements fulfill their basic tenet: "Only let someone competent do a job?"

Even with a real degree, I'd certainly have doubts.

Re:equivalence systems

[foidulus]

Supposedly a degree shows a willingness to challenge oneself and the ability to expand ones mental horizons. Though with the number of "diploma mills" in the US(and elsewhere) parading around as accredited schools, I doubt that is true anymore.
An education isn't supposed to be a job training program, it's supposed to help you develop the skills needed to tackle any problem. This usually means doing more experimentation and research and less belching up whatever you crammed in last night on a test. Knowing where to look up obscure details is more important than memorizing them(because you will probably forget them anyway) However, that seems to no longer be the case in America's schools, and it is indeed sad.
Sayonara creative problem solving!

Re:equivalence systems

[kabocox]

I don't want a doctor that only knows how to expand his mental horizons and creatively problem solve. I want a doctor that can tell me what is wrong and if he determines that there is nothing wrong with me won't just give me drugs to make me happy and go away (otherwise known as creative problem solving.)

I don't want emergency personnel that have to look up things in the big book what is wrong with me and how to treat it. It may take them 10-15 min. to look it up, but I want them acting on me to save my life in that 10-15 mins not looking up information that they should know!

Re:equivalence systems

[override11]

But above all, the main thing a degree shows is that someone had the time and the money to go through and get the degree. I am 25 years old, and have been working at this current job for 3 years as a network admin, and the past year more and more as a coldfusion coder. Prior to that, I did sysadmin work hourly for local business that couldnt afford a full time IT person. Would you rather hire someone fresh out of school, or someone with 6 years on the job experience that is still young enough to be somewhat cheap? =)

Re:equivalence systems

[V_M_Smith]

I don't want a doctor that only knows how to expand his mental horizons and creatively problem solve. I want a doctor that can tell me what is wrong and if he determines that there is nothing wrong with me won't just give me drugs to make me happy and go away (otherwise known as creative problem solving.)

This is an entirely different situation. Medicine is considered a "professional school" (much like law, dentistry, etc.) in which the point is to learn the skills and background needed to do the job and not an academic pursuit like philosophy, history, mathematics or physics.

Re:equivalence systems

[be951]

Apples and oranges. A masters bears little resemblance to an M.D. or nursing degree or even EMT certification. What is the point of comparing the vast majority of professions that can be successfully executed with OJT and minimal other training, with a select few that require highly specific training that can mean the difference between life and death? Besides, nearly all health care providers must be licensed in addition to their educational pedigree.

I'm unimpressed

[Otter]

I'd be curious to see this report -- who are these "28 top federal employees"? From that description, I'd expect people one or two notches below Cabinet level jobs, not "including nuclear monitors". If they found a total of 28 white collar workers in the entire US government with sketchy degrees. I'd say the practice isn't too prevalent.

In any case, if you have a degree from something like that "Capella University" that advertises in banner ads here, it's not like you're reaping huge benefits from it. The biggest is probably in union jobs or whatever where a degree automatically gets you a higher pay scale.

Classify Bogus degree

[MerlynEmrys67]

Shouldn't be a problem if they say they have a degree from Ajax school of blundering idiots, and indeed they do have that degree from Ajax.

I would be much more concerned with individuals in government that claim to have degrees from the University of Texas (graduating with honors) when in fact they flunked out after their freshman year. ( I know this one happened when said in-duh-vidual came to speak at a commencement at my college and ended up getting exposed ).

The problem as I see it is that a lot of "automatic" extra money comes along with saying I have an additional degree - there needs to be limits on this "automatic" money, to include things like "from an accredited source". The government is just a bunch of idiots if they accept degrees from non-accredited sources

In Corporatist America

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Bullshit, it shows they are liars and will probably be fired and sued for the overcompensation they received.

In Corporatist America, being a liar means that you're better qualified to be a C-level executive.

I estimate about 3%

[Anonymous Coward]

Years ago, I worked in state government higher education. Our HR policies were created by the Board of Trustees and very much centered on degree requirements. By the time a person received a job offer, they were required to have their offical (sealed) transcripts sent directly from the college that issued the degree. About 5% of the time, the documents would not appear. In some cases, the people found jobs elsewhere for a higher salary and a faster hiring process. How many of the 5% were bogus degrees is debatable but I know of several cases where our candidates dropped out of the process and turned up as applicants elsewhere in state government -- they chose continued unemployement over supplying the proper documentation for a job where an offer was pending. These candidates are the ones who were not smart enough to manufacture bogus envelopes and mail the bogus payload from the appropriate city.

Almost anything can be faked: degrees, certifications, job experience, employers, etc. Overseas degrees are difficult to verify (how hard would it be to register a domain and set up your own bogus offshore college?) Desktop publishing takes care of the actual diploma and maybe a transcript. In a pinch, you could scan the characters off of a Chinese restaurant menu. Sure, I have a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Moo Shoo Pork. Is anybody in HR willing to stay in the office until 8:00PM to call what appears to be a college in China and try to find someone who speaks English?

In some parts of the world, bribery is a common business practice. I suspect there are places where clerks can manufacture a degree with a complete audit trail from a nationally accredited college. A scam like this would not hold up for very long in the US, but there are places where this would be easy. Considering what I have seen, nothing would surpise me.

Then again, it is simpler and probably more effective to use an obscure private college that has merged and changed names. Ideally, you want a college that is listed in old editions of a higher education directory but is missing from the new editions. Anything less than a militant stance on degree verification is going to let the bogus degrees get past the gatekeepers.

Experience is even easier to fake. If I claim to be a senior IT director for Enron with 20 direct reports and data centers in 3 states, how is anyone going to prove me wrong? Look! I have all these letters of recommendation, on what appears to be Enron letterhead! Take any corporate merger, and assume the role of senior manager who got nuked for being on the wrong side when the deal went down. You don't need a real name or a real job title, just a plausible story that is impossible to verify.

The interview process is 100x as useful as the employement and education verification process. At best, you can weed out the dumbest of the dumb who make grandiose claims without making an attempt to cover their tracks.

In my opinion, anyone who is not finding 3% of degree claims to be fake is just not paying attention. In some cases, we should be more honest about what these credentials are truly worth, and learn to live with people who have proven talent without a pile of wallpaper.