Fake degrees fail under scrutiny
When Amy Robertson was hired as the principal of Pittsburg High School in Kansas, student journalists began work on what they thought would be a welcoming puff piece. When they discovered Robertson had lied about her credentials and that she had bought diplomas from a known degree mill, the story they wrote ultimately resulted in her resignation.
The students have been rightly celebrated for their reporting. The real question is why it was necessary.
Every year in the United States, universities award 45,000 legitimate doctorates, while an estimated 50,000 people buy themselves fake PhDs. This isn’t new information, but every year it seems to catch by surprise those responsible for hiring people.
Fake degrees are held by doctors, lawyers, therapists, teachers and others we count on to be well-trained. A few years ago the senior assistant secretary of defense, head of human resources for 2 million people, was found to have a fake master’s degree.
That was far from the first time a senior government employee had used a fake diploma. After a senior director at the Department of Homeland Security was found to have bought three degrees, including a doctorate from a degree mill in Wyoming, the Government Accounting Office found 28 seniorlevel employees in eight federal agencies had bought degrees from diploma mills and other unaccredited schools. They included a nuclear engineer.
Yet time after time these frauds manage to insinuate themselves into positions of authority. It’s estimated that 100,000 federal employees have credentials from a degree mill.
Part of the problem is that people simply accept stated credentials, even though checking credentials isn’t hard. One merely has to do the work.
As the Kansas high school reporters found, the website of the university holds clues. For example, check the school’s advertised address using Google Maps. If you see a UPS Store or a Holiday Inn, it probably isn’t a topnotch university.
Ask about the school’s accreditation status. If it claims to be accredited, is it with an agency approved by the Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation? If not, why?
Sure, there are exceptions. Some legitimate religious schools consider academic accreditation as irrelevant to their mission. But you can’t ask if something’s wrong if you simply accept that everything’s right.
Bringing some detective skills to work with us would help so many Americans, especially during this time of year, when identity theft tax return frauds are so prevalent. As it turns out, most Americans hit by scams don’t double-check what they’re told. Most phishing scams would fold like a cheap accordion with even the most cursory online verification.
Every year police departments are forced to tell tens of thousands of people who fell for some kind of online scam the bad news: Investigating these cyber-enabled crimes after the fact is logarithmically harder than it would have been for the victim to investigate the claims before it became a crime.
The Federal Trade Commission says fraud cost Americans $744 million in 2016. The FTC says that the fastest-growing scam is imposter fraud: when someone pretends to be someone they’re not such as an IRS tax official, police officer, service provider or other person of authority. Like a school principal.
The FTC says it had 400,000 complaints about imposter fraud last year, making it a crime more common than identity theft.
Quite a bit of subterfuge can be cleared up with a simple phone call. When reporters from the Kansas high school spoke with her, Robertson told them she’d received in 1991 a bachelor of fine arts degree in theater arts from the University of Tulsa. The reporters called Tulsa and were told by the registrar that the institution has never offered a bachelor of fine arts degree.
As the intrepid student reporters at Pittsburg High discovered, sometimes a little leg work is all that stands between your kids and an imposter.