http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-phony-degreesaug10,0,5358282.story?page=2
Tribune reporter Russell Working tells about his adventures with diploma mills, where $699 and ‘life experience’ would earn him a degree in just about anything.
George Gollin, a professor and diploma-mill fraud-buster from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been leading the way in exposing how easy it is to get a fake degree.
Several years ago, he discovered that St. Regis University, based near Spokane, Wash., was offering high school degrees for those who filled out an online form with 100 questions, starting out with, "Where does the president of the United States live?" On a form with four possible answers to each question, Gollin intentionally clicked most of them wrong.
St. Regis was so impressed with his answers, it said he was eligible for both high school and associate’s degrees.
"If I were to give the test form to a bunch of pigeons and let them pick answers by randomly pecking," Gollin said, "I would have been outscored by slightly more than 75 percent of the pigeons who took the test."
In my case, I decided to expand my employment options by applying for a PhD in child and family studies from Rochville University. As a doctoral thesis, I submitted the Unabomber manifesto, written by domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski.
Under the title "Consequences of the Industrial Revolution: A Jungian Approach," I submitted a 34,000-word rant by a madman imprisoned for mailing bombs that killed three people and wounded 22. Not to worry. A few hours later, Kaczynski’s wisdom had qualified me to hang out in playgrounds and scribble notes on the behavior of other people’s children.
For my doctorate in theology and Biblical counseling from the bogus Belford University, I submitted the Hamas charter as my thesis. The work blames "Zionists" for corrupting education and culture worldwide though secret guises as "Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like." The universities replied positively in remarkably similar e-mails, which made me think they might be different faces of the same diploma scheme. Then I began getting calls on my cell phone from diploma mill representatives demanding the money. The "universities" kept e-mailing to say I had only seven days to pay. When the deadline passed, they all granted me another seven. I never paid anything to any of them.
Recently, I asked Rochville to change my PhD to architecture and urban planning, and it agreed without asking for additional life experience or documentation. So I sent another e-mail asking to change it to a PhD in theater arts.
"I started thinking I’d like to direct musicals, such as ‘Mame,’ ‘The Fields of Ambrosia,’ ‘Criminally Insane Puppets’ (better than it sounds!), etc.," I wrote, adding, "P.S. It’s very important that you spell it this way: Theatre. I’m thinking of moving to London."
They agreed once again.
So I called up Rochville and spoke to a "student counselor" who spoke with a foreign accent, identifying himself as Jason Anderson. When I asked, he said he was in Maryland.
I told him I had used the Unabomber manifesto. Why would the 10-member faculty committee accredit that Kaczynski diatribe?
Not so fast, Anderson said.
"After that e-mail is sent to you, there’s a whole process that goes after that," he said. "You get yourself registered, and then actually we go deeper into what you’ve done, and find out what major you qualify for."
Whew! Glad we cleared that up. I’m sure they all operate that way.
So let’s see how confident they are in their own degrees. Would the members of Ashwood University’s evaluation committee please line up at my cubicle for their prostate exams?
