Diploma Mills – derogatory term or needed service?

[Wayne Caswell]

I sent this last week as an op-ed response to an article by Diana Jean Schemo of the New York Times, “Fake college degrees raise terror concerns” which was republished in the Austin American-Statesman on Sunday, 6/29/2008. Her claim was that fake degrees could help terrorists gain entry to the U.S., but it’s important to understand why this industry exists in the first place.

Internet startups offering academic credit and degrees for life experiences are often labeled “diploma mills” when they lack accreditation, but this growing industry exists because educational needs are going unfulfilled.

Our nation faces an education crisis that causes me to question the relevancy of our academic system in these changing times of shorter careers and higher tuition in a tougher economy, as well as employers making short-term decisions and increases in H-1B visas.

Major universities have been slow to change and give credit for learning received outside of their classrooms, and they criticize the innovators who are doing so. Their arguments are valid when bogus degrees have no merit and the diplomas are exchanged for cash. But other times an online diploma captures expertise that can’t be gained in classrooms and might otherwise not appear on a resume.

Shorter Careers and Higher Tuition in a Tough Economy
College degrees help us get jobs and establish careers, but it’s getting harder to justify the rising costs, as careers get shorter and loans get harder to come by. Rather than working for one company for 30 years or more, we now tend to change careers several times in a lifetime and jobs more often than that, so there are fewer years to recover the cost of education before updating our skills and credentials for the next career.

What’s needed is a better way for employers to evaluate a candidate’s ability to perform and learn. If major colleges and universities don’t fulfill that need, others will, and the “diploma mill” industry is a result.

The Shrinking Small Business Alternative
If it’s getting harder to justify the cost and time of a college degree, as well as the continued costs to renew skills with each new career, why not just become a self-employed entrepreneur? Because, public policies have evolved to favor large corporations with economies of scale in buying power, marketing, and lobby influence. That influence has made it harder and riskier to start small businesses that compete with larger ones; and the danger of this trend is a slow decline in both innovative risk-taking and education preparedness. The U.S. is losing its global competitiveness.

Short-term Decision Making
Part of the problem appears to be short-term decision making. Too many large companies now fire good workers when projects end, and hire others with specific skills for new projects, rather than retraining. This seems to occur when quarterly profits get more attention than strategic long-term investments, when CEO compensation is tied to stockholder returns, and when retirement plans shift from traditional pensions to 401Ks that emphasize stock performance. The result of this behavior is a decline in loyalty – companies less loyal to employees, and workers less loyal to employers. It leads to shorter careers and the need to retool skills and explain those lessons learned from life experiences.

H-1B Visas citing Bogus Degrees
Displaced high-tech workers worry about competition from an increasing number of foreign guest workers on H-1B visas, and some ask if “diploma mills” could be a tool for terrorists. It’s possible, if U.S. employers rely on fake Ph.D. degrees to show regulators that foreign new hires have the specialized knowledge required by law.

The security exposure occurs when it’s easy to buy a diploma with no oversight and agreed-upon accreditation. Diploma mills also undermine the credibility of legitimate attempts to test and quantify expertise to comply with accepted standards.

Accreditation and Quality Standards
Employers rely on accreditation as a trusted way to gauge job candidate qualifications, which often come from a university degree; but similar credibility can come from formal testing laboratories and certification specialists. The problem with diploma mills is when certification specialists aren’t themselves qualified and take shortcuts to “sell” diplomas. That, and the lack of oversight, leads employers to distrust some candidate credentials.

The Internet as a Distance Learning Solution
Because of the importance of life-long learning beyond high school and college, workers need affordable and convenient ways to gain new skills for new careers while still working in older ones. One approach is with online distance learning programs, but workers also need ways to show qualifications and learning obtained from life experiences. So an online certificate, diploma or degree that packages a mix of classroom and life experiences into a credible bundle denoting competence should be helpful to both employee and employer and not arbitrarily discredited.

The Virtual Classroom – Saving the Planet is a good article by Brian Egler, describing his real-life experience helping enterprise IT shops eliminate the high travel costs of technical training.


My Own Experience (only for perspective, not to publish)
I started working at IBM before completing any of my three Associate degrees. Even after completing a Bachelor’s degree, I saw no resulting increase in salary. That’s because a degree is just a door opener and, once inside, advancement depends on proven performance. IBM nurtured my career, providing at least a month of technical and management training each year for the 30 years I was there, sometimes in places like Harvard and Princeton, and it valued these courses and my career progress.

After leaving IBM, I found it difficult to quantify the value of lessons learned from those company classes, or the many years worth of on-the-job experience, which collectively exceed the requirements of an MBA but aren’t packaged into a nice, accredited degree.

Likewise, the many market research reports that I wrote at IBM or afterwards as an independent consultant, would match the dissertation requirements of a Ph.D., but alas that credential escapes me too. Having these graduate degrees would make it easier to explain my qualifications, but universities don’t substitute testing of life experience for classroom instruction and demand a given amount of tuition revenue before granting a degree.

I noticed that after returning from the Vietnam War. I had lost my 2-S deferment and was drafted but was able to take civilian classes while moving around in the Army. My first step after returning home was to work nights at IBM while completing courses at my old community college that, in one semester, earned three Associate degrees.

I then transferred to American University. I had accumulated way more credits than needed for a Bachelor’s Degree, and they accepted the credits, but they wouldn’t let me just pay for the diploma. So, because I had already taken all of the undergraduate courses, I ended up getting my BS with all graduate-level courses.

Maybe I should buy my advanced degrees online from a diploma mill.