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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?"
Of course, forget about those 'honorary' degrees, or non-accredited but soon-to-be universities such as the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
This story runs into a pet peeve of mine. When people are caught with fake degrees, their employers usually say "Oh, it's okay, we didn't hire him for his education anyway. Just his experience and background." My reply is, did you hire him for his integrity and honesty? Cause you sure didn't get what you paid for. And it's not the foreigners doing it. It's American citizens.
Conesus
Don't eat your soul to fill your belly.
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Not only did the guy have a bogus degree. He claimed to have a MCSE, CCNA, and RHCE. Retired from the Military with 8 years in as well as 8+ years of Solaris, +2 linux, +4 SQL/MySQL. Turns out when I asked him what to expect from "ps-e | grep sendmail" on our solaris box he kind of just blinked and said "I did more coding on it than anything".
Turns out he has +3 years of C. Which he can't code in, no solaris exp, no linux exp, no SQL exp, and did not know how to put together a computer from scratch. Let alone, no Certs at all and a bogus degree.
The kicker? They hired him, then found all this out. Did they fire him? Nope cut his pay in 1/2 and put him in customer service.....I am amazed to this day.
The justification quote "We could get him for 1/2 of what we pay you."
Classic, just classic.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
He writes a story "fake" degrees in the Michael Parker story(though the degree is real, but the person in question didn't earn it, but used it to get a job anyway)
Offtopic, but interesting.
I've seen people with real CS degrees who one year out of college couldn't code more than 5 lines in their favorite language. They're most likely to become managers, which ironically pays more than if they had to program.
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.
My thing is that I graduated with a BS from an state university. Both my brothers barely made it out of HS. Both my brothers make more than me. I know it averages and odd data points. I just hate seeing my brothers do better than me money wise when I was always ahead of them in grades in school.
Life teaches you that school doesn't matter. Work doesn't matter other than the money you earn. What really matters is that you are somewhat happy doing what you do. If the money is a limiting factor for you, because you don't make much, find a job that you can earn more at. (You may not like it as much though.)
Actually, both my brothers are slightly happier than I am. Ok. I have a wife and they don't so I am unhappy far more often than they are.
Among the projects were memorial things like sticking colored beads to styrofoam spheres with pins (very attractive), drawing, and other things that struck me more as being "arts and craft" than math.
About two years after I was out of junior high, she was arrested on the basis that her teaching degrees were completely fictious. She was sent to jail for a few years.
The irony was, that after she got out of jail the city hired her as an accountant. Go figure. And I suck at math and blame it on her (but you should see my beaded styrofoam sphere collection :).
There are plenty of methods of sorting people that work better, but they have mostly become illegal in the past 50 years. Race and background are still reasonably good indicators. IQ testing is a tremendous indicator of future job performance -- far better than degrees -- but the Supreme Court made IQ testing for employment illegal 35 years ago.
What you have to understand is that the "signal to potential employeers that you have the determination to achive something difficult" speech is code. What college degrees actually do is tell employers that the person holding the degree is more likely to come from such and such an economic background (hence the outsized importance of ivy league diplomas) and is more likely to be white, Jewish, or Asian. It also tells employers that the holder of the diploma is likely have an IQ above some threshold.
I went to one of those real expensive accredited schools, but I was essentially a retard for four years and scraped by just enough to get my piece of paper without a shred of new knowledge (in class, that is... Oh boy did I learn a lot of new extra curricular knowledge) that I didn't already possess when I went in.
How is my degree more valid than a $99 WalMart degree? Because I paid more money for it?
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.
Actually, that's incorrect. Of all the students at Capella, the majority are working on their PhD's, second largest group are working on their Majors, then Bachelors, then Undergraduate work.
I don't know about you - but I don't know of an carpenters with a Doctorate, do you? Just because it's not a brick and mortar university, doesn't mean it's a diploma mill by any means.
Full Disclosure: I work for Capella
The University of Cambridge. After you get a BA you wait a few years (that's the 'life experience' bit) and you can then buy an MA.
While you're right that they hand out bogus degrees, the MA isn't the bogus one. The BA is bogus.
When you enter Oxford or Cambridge as an undergraduate, you're studying for the degree of MA. The MA is a seven-year course, just as it has been for the past eight hundred years.
After three years, you've finished your lectures, and you get a certificate saying that. This certificate is called a BA. It's not a degree, and it doesn't give you any of the privileges of having a degree (eg, being allowed to mark exams); it's just an affirmation that you've studied for three years and passed some exams.
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Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I sometimes wonder about the validity of my 'academic' degree in Economics (as opposed to my trade degree in Electronics).
Most US universities actually offer two Econ degrees: one in the liberal arts college and one in the business college. Generally the arts degree requires upper level language and literature study for a B.A. while the business college requires upper level marketing and accounting classes for a B.S.
Depending on the university, it is possible to get an Econ degree without writing a single paper in four years. Econ classes (at least the ones that I took) never required undergrads to write papers. For my upper-level arts classes, I ran the university film committee for three semesters. Got college credit and got paid for doing the projection work.
Generally Econ classes are not difficult if you accept the fact that what you're studying has little grounding in reality. For example, we were taught that high unemployment and high inflation would not happen at the same time, but that was exactly what was happening in the late 1970's when the deficits incurred as a result of losing the Vietnam War and the OPEC oil shocks were working their way through the economy after a few years delay. (Don't look now, but something similar will likely happen again in about five years).
Anyway, the classes were full of contradictory material, there were no papers due, and no seriously difficult material to master. So is an Economics degree bogus even when it's legit?
I might add that there is absolutely nothing that you can do with an Econ degree. If you are not making more money from student aid, Pell Grants, scholarships, and subsidized student services than you are paying for tution and opportunity cost of hanging out in Econ classes, then chose another major.
A degree may show a willingness to challenge oneself, but more often it simply shows that you had both the money and time to go to University. I've got my diploma, and I know the contents of the equivilent degree course... while some of the basic problem solving theories and documentation/coding practices were useful, I could have learned them in a 2-4 month course. The rest is all pretty much dogcrap which has been of little use to me in my job, nor have any seen many other jobs where it would prove useful.
Ability to adapt, learn fast, and think outside "the box" (in this case, I have to think not only like a programmer but also as a user) have kept me my job and made me good at it. I learned more within the first 6 months at work than I did in college, and I'm still learning.
That being said, there's definately something to be said about programs that offer a "co-op" or paid practicum term. It helps pay the college bills, and gives really valuable experience. If anything out of college was useful to me, I'd say that my workterms were the most important.
Of course, I'd definately have trouble trusting some guy who claimed to have X years of experience in field Y. Even with a degree, I'd look much more at his employment history in related fields than post-secondary education. But if his experience was limited, a degree would still count for something.
I once had a candidate call me and ask about a job that was advertised. I was the hiring manager for the position, which made me the chairman of the search committee. The candidate said, "I was thinking about applying for the job, and my experience looks like a good match, but I have no degree. How serious are you about the degree requirement?" I explained that if the degree requirement was enforceable, meaning we found a very good candidate who also had a degree, then the degree requirement would be enforced. On the other hand, I was not going to be limited to hiring the second or third best candidate just to enforce the requirement -- at that point, I would rather make an exception. If you want to find out what we will do, you must be willing to print a resume and invest 32 cents for a stamp. The worst we can do is say no.
As an EMT, I just want to make a clarification. We EMTs don't really *treat* anything. We manage conditions until a person is stable enough to get to a hospital for treatment. Belive me, you dont want an EMT to treat you for a broken neck. Put you in a cervical collar and then a full spinal package for transport? Yea, you want that.
And another good point was raised in that all EMTs have an educational certification, but that's not what allows them to practice. The certification to work is issued by either an organization called the National Registry or the states themselves. That certification is dependant on course completion, skills demostration, and a surprisingly rigorous test.
All that being said, emergency medical work takes a great degree of creative problem solving. You ever tried to get someone out of a compact car (thats become much more compact) without turning their head? Just try it next time in your own car. Now imagine doing that in on an interstate covered in blood, glass, metal, and with broken legs.
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