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

[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

[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]

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

[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.

Call me Dr. $99

[Conesus]

That's right. You can actually buy a doctorate for only $99 smackers. Amazing, isn't it? To think, that a non-accredited "university" would dish out meaningless degrees.

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

Re:Call me Dr. $99

[NearlyHeadless]

There's an interesting presentation (8 MB PDF) from George Gollin, who researched (mostly on the Internet) these diploma mills. There are a few players who operate under a lot of different names. It's 123 pages, but basically a slide show, so it goes really fast.

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

An excoworker had one

[SoCalChris]

About a year ago, we found a bunch of an old coworker's newsgroup postings.

One of them was looking to buy a forged degree from the California State University system. The posting was from a few months before he got the job with us, and of course, when he applied he said he had a degree from Cal State Long Beach.

All of the others postings of his were personal ads of him looking for someone to kidnap and anally torture him, or for someone to dress up like a super hero in spandex with him. The day we found all of those was the day I laughed the hardest I ever have in my life.

The guy wasn't well liked to begin with, but all of his old newsgroup postings made it so we couldn't even look at the guy without laughing.

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.

YES.

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

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.

Re:YES.

[kabocox]

I have 3 questions for you. Where did you work, how much was half what you are paid, and are those managers still there?

Re:I'm unimpressed

[michaelggreer]

From the CBS story:

"Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles Abell has a master's from Columbus University, a diploma mill Louisiana shut down. Deputy Assistant Secretary Patricia Walker lists among her degrees, a bachelor's from Pacific Western, a diploma mill banned in Oregon and under investigation in Hawaii"

These two, at least, are indeed just below cabinet level

There are a lot of "fraulleges" out there..

[RainbearNJ]

But then there are at least a few that do help you do things like CLEP out of classes based on life experience. And they are acredited, like the Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey.

Then again, they're not a "Send us $99 and we'll give you an MBA" type of school, either.

Re:Bogus Resumes

[dtfinch]

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.

Re:I'm unimpressed

[RyanGWU82]

Mr. Abell is not "Assistant Secretary of Defense" as the article claims. His actual title is Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness which puts him three levels below Rumsfeld.

Likewise, Ms. Walker's actual title is Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Material and Facilities) (PDF), but even that's misleading because it's only for Reserve Affairs. In other words, she's 4-5 levels below Rumsfeld, as this PDF indicates.

In the big scheme of the federal government, those people are high, but not unreasonably so. There are thousands of employees at their level.

It's strange that they're in the Department of Defense, though. You'd think that a significant security clearance would be required for that kind of job. On the other hand, having a worthless master's degree wouldn't necessarily disqualify them from the job.

Ryan

Bogus Degrees... My Experience

[MrIcee]

Way back when, in junior high school (and I'm currently 46 - so Wayyyyyy back when) - my math teacher, a jovial, portly, good natured woman, always had us do assignments that were strangly non-math related.

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 :).

Bogus how?

[clambake]

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?

Wired News coverage about diploma mills.

[KevinDumpsCore]

Check out Wired New's coverage of diploma mills:
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54596,00.h tml

They note that US colleges should be accredited by either the Department of Education or the Council on Higher Education Accreditation.

Does an Economics degree count?

[Simonetta]

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.