
Fraud U: Toppling a Bogus-Diploma Empire - Anon84
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_fake_physics/all/1
======
fcvghjmk
And yet bizarrely it's almost impossible to convince US employers, an
especially the INS that overseas universities are legitimate.

In one statement to the INS I had to explain that: No - King's college
Cambridge was not a community college.

~~~
elblanco
>especially the INS that overseas universities are legitimate

I've seen this particularly with Eastern European countries and India.

Two quick anecdotes,

A girl I knew in High School came to the U.S. from Poland. Her father was a
surgeon. The medical license and degrees weren't recognized here. He worked as
a janitor at night while going to school (again) to qualify for the board
exams.

I've noticed in many organizations that universities in India are sometimes
viewed with suspicious as the quality of the output (in the IT field) can vary
wildly. The ITTTs for example are considered fine, but there are hundreds of
other schools that are very hard to get any visibility on. In a few disastrous
cases I've seen, people were hired based on their 4 year degree in CS or IS or
IT, yet they graduated without ever having written a single line of code! It
becomes very hard to filter those people out without having a fairly extensive
pre-interview screening process.

~~~
rdtsc
> I've noticed in many organizations that universities in India are sometimes
> viewed with suspicious as the quality of the output (in the IT field) can
> vary wildly.

I have seen that first-hand. From my experience, H1B workers from India are
very under-qualified. They are usually hired for their low pay demands not for
exceptional knowledge. I don't want to start a flame war, this is just my
experience, but the level of knowledge of some H1B employees is that of a
someone taking a few community college courses. No theortical background. Most
don't know what an algorithm is, instead they repeat a set of jargon IT words
they read somewhere in a book.

While we are on the stereotyping bandwagon, I have noticed that programmers
from Eastern Europe & former Soviet Block have a much better grasp of CS
theory and math. Chinese programmers fall somewhere in between.

Again, downvote if you like, this is just what I observed, I don't know why
that is and your experience will probably vary.

~~~
elblanco
Yes it's stereotyping and yes it's bad and all that. But I think my
experiences are roughly on par with yours.

I've seen some absolutely stellar Indian hires though, but they really tended
to come from the better, more established schools. A colleague of mine has
been staffing her department heavily with Indian candidates not because the
asking salary is cheaper, but because that just so happens to be where most of
the candidates are coming from.

>instead they repeat a set of jargon IT words they read somewhere in a book

I've noticed the IT-jargon diarrhea as a pervasive problem on Indian resumes.
Of the couple hundred or so resumes I've reviewed in the last six months, only
the Indian ones had a section under each previous employer labeled
"environment" followed by a list of every hot IT technology in the last 20
years. Sometimes to comical effect, "wow you worked in a place that used
Cobol, Java Server Pages, Perl, Python, Ruby, AND Quantum Computing? And you
list that you are an expert in the Waterfall Methodology AND RAD?".

I admire our immigrant population for coming to seek a better life and
typically for their awesome work ethic. But sometimes the standard Resume
Writing 101 course that seems to be taught at every Indian IT trade school
does a disservice to them.

------
cschneid
I'm going to argue this from the point of law, rather than the relative value
of faked degrees, and if the university system has any merit by itself.

From the article, it appears like there are no laws saying you can't make an
unaccredited university, and start issuing degrees. I may be wrong, but the
charges seem to point that way.

The charges against him in the article were: * Conspiracy to commit
{wire,mail} fraud * Bribing foreign officials

Conspiracy is what federal prosecutors go with when there's no actual crime
committed, since it doesn't actually require a crime for a successful
prosecution (only that several people intended to do something illegal). It's
used as a stopgap to "get the bad guys", even when law isn't really there to
support it. [for reference, check out the book '3 Felonies a Day']. The
bribing of foreign officials obviously isn't directly related to the "fake"
university.

So we go a step further, and look into if it even should be illegal. If I set
up cschneid's Drive Through University, I will obviously never get accredited
by a proper agency. But I'd probably argue that cschneid's Drive Through U
should have free speech to print up paper saying people passed it's program,
and have a degree showing that. No matter how bad that program is. It still
should be illegal to lie about accreditation status, or similar (but that
falls under existing misrepresentation and fraud laws).

I'd say that this argument is parellel to the Underwriter's Laboratory. The
government does not mandate or require any electronics manufacturer to get
certified by UL (afaik). But many environments require a UL seal to use any
electronics, one example being the dorm I lived in. So it's a certification of
quality, in the same way a university degree is a certification of quality for
a person (by a 3rd party). Presumably, I'd be able to start my cschneid's
laboratory, and certify whoever pays me for my logo. Why is that significantly
different from a diploma mill?

I personally have a university degree, from an accredited school. But I
dislike people taking social solutions (look up the degree & university in a
database, say it's accredited), backed by existing laws (fraud, etc), and then
turn it into a new set of laws, that restrict free speech. I think to sum up,
if I want to hand out bad diplomas, that should be fine, as long as I'm
truthful about it. Existing laws cover this environment well, and printing
paper should not be an illegal act without an intent to defraud.

~~~
imgabe
The government doesn't directly require a UL label, but the National Electric
Code (which is produced by an independent organiztion, the NFPA) does. The NEC
is adopted as law by most jurisdictions, so not complying with it means you
won't get a building permit. Hence, in a roundabout way, it is required by
law. As it stands, you're free to manufacture something without a UL label,
but it won't be able to be installed in any building where the plans have to
go through a permit process, so you'd have a hard time selling it to anyone.

I didn't read anything in the article propose laws that would make
unaccredited degrees illegal. What they said was there should be stricter
standards for accreditation, overseen by the government. Right now some
accreditation authorities are just organizations made up of a group of
diploma-mill like universities who all agree to accredit each other.

For engineering positions in the US government, they usually require that your
school be specifically accredited by ABET, which is legitimate. I remember
them conducting inspections at my school while I was there to determine that
our engineering labs met their requirements.

~~~
cschneid
Thanks for the info on UL, I forgot about the in-wall parts of things, and was
focusing on toasters and such.

Basically, I'm saying that the government should stay out of it, unless it's
actual fraud. It bothers me that it's a monopoly on the specific form of
speech saying "this is a good school" and "this is a diploma".

I'm really coming from the stance of a wanna-be libertarian, I understand that
the government must do things, but where possible, I think social and private-
sector answers are more flexible, and less agressive towards various rights.

It just bothers me that I can't setup a legit-but-not-accredited school and
issue diplomas without somebody potentially trying to come and get me, or
prosecute me for wire fraud.

------
elblanco
A great research tool for verifying degrees of new hires that we use is:
<http://www.nslc.org/>

There's a nominal fee for each lookup, but considering the money to be saved
in avoiding a bad hire, it's proven itself extremely worthwhile when doing
final candidate vetting.

------
RK
A friend of mine once conned an online degree peddler from Israel into sending
him a diploma for a BS in Business Ethics. I think he threatened him with
reporting him to the relevant authorities or something. The irony of the whole
thing was of course great.

------
blintson
I think the diploma mills, for the most part, make the world a better
place,and the Secret Service has no business doing anything about it* . The
primary obstacle to getting a an undergrad. degree is paying for it.

Most white collar jobs require a degree because everybody gets a degree, and
anybody who doesn't go to college must be too stupid to to get one. Most
people who want a shot at a middle classs life start out with $20 -30k in debt
from college tuition alone. I don't think it's right that anybody who wants to
do science or white collar work is expected to just give piles and piles of
money to universities.

* I don't think they have any business with credit cards either. SS pursuing credit card fraud is a huge subsidy to the CC industry. Credit cards take 2-6% of every transaction and we all pay for catching people gaming the system.

* * Somebody's bound to post that the fake degrees lead to hiring people where safety's involved: Unless you know of something specific, don't say anything. I strongly suspect 99+% of the time when people bought a fake diploma were for white collar jobs where it wasn't necessary anyway.

~~~
btilly
My complaint about people who get fake degrees is that they are liars and
cheats, and if they are willing to lie and cheat about one thing then they are
willing to lie and cheat about other things and I don't want them around.

My opinion on diploma mills is that they make it easier for liars and cheats
to be more effective liars and cheats, so clamping down on them reduces the
amount of lying and cheating in our society and that is a Good Thing.

My opinion on university degrees is that they have a slight correlation with
brains but are not very good predictors. Some of the best people in IT that
I've ever worked with never finished college. Including the programmer who
mentored me at my start. (He never graduated because he was so good at his
summer internship that they gave him a job offer he couldn't turn down.) I
would therefore be delighted to hire the right non-college graduate. But not
if they were the kind of person who thinks it OK to lie and cheat their way
past the issue of not having a degree.

I have a feeling that the two of us won't agree on much. And the key
difference is that you think that lying and cheating are OK while I don't.

------
alecco
This reminds me of official churches trying to weed out "sects."

"Universities are the last medieval institutions, besides the Catholic
church."

~~~
brown9-2
Except these "sects" don't actually offer any education.

~~~
aaronsw
And apparently neither do the universities -- if so many people can do so many
important jobs with nobody noticing they never went to a university, what's
their "education" good for?

I went to Stanford and while it's true, the students did take classes where
they heard facts, I didn't see anyone coming away from them having learned
much. Instead, it just seemed like a test of whether you could stand it long
enough / pay enough money before getting a piece of paper.

~~~
simon_
I don't think that's fair. My computer science education was seriously
enriched by the community of students and professors at Stanford, even if I
could have learned the basic material mostly on my own.

~~~
endtime
Same, though my experience is subject to selection bias; I'm an MS student, so
I only tend to meet grad students and the more motivated undergrads (the ones
who take grad classes or the ones who care enough to come to my office hours).

Despite having a BS in CS, I've still learned a lot about computer science at
Stanford, and (thanks to the ridiculous amount TAs get paid here) I've had to
pay very little for my degree.

------
chrischen
I've always been confused about this: after incrimination for cases like
these, do these people get to keep their money?

~~~
Retric
That depends on how well it's hidden.

~~~
chrischen
So in other words, they aren't required to pay back their ill-got money.

------
DanielBMarkham
A couple of questions occurred to me while reading this. I hope I can make my
case diplomatically.

Who's to say what a PhD program really entails? I understand that there are
professional accreditation organizations. My question is simple: if I am the
president of Newbonia, why can't I set up my universities to require 20 years
of study before awarding a PhD? Or one year and a up-front payment of $30K?
The implication here is that less studying and more bribery is always bad, but
is that always the case? If you shaved 20% off the work of a "normal" PhD have
you really defrauded anyone? How about 60%? If so, how about if you make your
course more rigorous? If you made your programs require more work doesn't that
now imply that other countries are defrauding their students?

If this is truly a multi-million-dollar business, and thousands of folks are
getting these "fake" certifications, are there any stories of people who have
been harmed by folks with fake diplomas? There was one case mentioned in the
story -- a fake therapist. But I find that unconvincing. Where's the societal
fallout from all this fakery? Is this a story about real people getting hurt
by fake-accredited folks? Or is it a story about academics up in arms over
people who got the same kind of degree without all the suffering they had to
go through? It seems to me to be the latter. But I honestly don't know.

I'm a huge believer in education, although perhaps not formal certification
programs, which I find too stilted and archaic. And I'm definitely no fan of
people lying to each other. But I wonder if we haven't reached a point _in
many cases_ where the degree is just a bullshit piece of paper needed for job
advancement. A social worker with a Master's degree is most likely not that
far advanced over one with a 4-year degree. In fact, the one with the lesser
degree might be much more effective in their job. It's just employers need
something to differentiate the worker bees and degrees seem like a natural
fit. It's stupid, the people who are asking for it know it's stupid, and the
people who are getting it understand it's stupid too. On top of this, prices
are going through the roof for these things. So people are just starting to
treat it like the silliness that it is and buying their degrees off the
internet.

Please don't think I am making a blanket case -- obviously a brain surgeon is
not something you can fake. But for the 80% of cases? Where some external
organization is requiring a piece of paper so you can move from line manager
to section manager or something like that? If the cost continues to rise _and
the knowledge received isn't actually being put to use_ then diploma mills
seem like a very natural and normal market response to me.

~~~
mquander
Well, regarding your first point, credible organizations accrediting
universities are the ones who are to say what a PhD program entails. These
diploma mills are unaccredited (or accredited via corrupt organizations) and
try to either hide, lie about, or whitewash that fact.

