Remote 'diploma mills' offer speedy degrees

For $2,500, a 25-page dissertation and a 32-cent stamp, any diploma - from nuclear engineering to education - can be yours.

"'Diploma mill' is the term used for a school where you send in money and they send you a degree," said Sally Welch, assistant director of the Distance Education and Training Council, an accrediting agency for distance education. "They are not at all legitimate."

Although many legitimate distance education institutions have been established in the United States since the late 1800s, many schools recently claiming they are accredited are fraudulently giving out diplomas to clueless students.

In return, the institutions usually ask for some sort of paper or written exercise - not nearly enough to gauge intellectual ability - and charge exorbitant prices ranging in the thousands of dollars for these diplomas.

Eugene Sullivan, one of three authors of "External Degrees in the Information Age: Legitimate Choices," warned about the danger of the diploma mills, saying the integrity of a degree is at stake.

"These diploma mills could very well cheapen the value of degrees," Sullivan said. "They threaten the reputation of legitimate and accredited distance education institutions."

Because many of the people who seek the diplomas reside in foreign countries and simply access the Internet to find one that sounds reputable, the mills try to entice students with a prestigious name.

"One ploy is that the school will adopt a name that is very similar to an accredited institution," said John Bear, co-author of "Bears' Guide to Earning College Degrees Non-traditionally."

"Names with 'America' or 'Columbia' always sound important," Bear said. This is true in the case of the University of Berkley, which sounds amazingly similar to the University of California school, but is conveniently spelled differently, lacking an extra "e."

The University of Berkley is supposedly located in Southfield, Mich., but it has phone and mail listings for Erie, Penn.

Bear said the institution is in fact being run in a garage. The University of Berkley refused to comment on the issue.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has only recently teamed up with higher education officials and gotten involved with tracking down fraudulent diploma mills. In the early '80s, the FBI closed down 39 institutions that claimed they were accredited.

But Bear said that many of the institutions that scam money from people are still in existence despite FBI crackdowns due to lenient state laws.

"The majority of these schools are located in Hawaii, Louisiana or Iowa," Bear said. He explained that the laws regulating higher education in these states are either non-existent or very lax.

Welch added that these institutions find ways to get around the laws.

"Many schools claim religious affiliation," Welch said. "By claiming relation to a church, they are exempt from state laws."

Bear said these so-called religiously affiliated schools have "stupid reasons" to justify their degree-selling programs.

They say "because God created everything, whatever you study, you are studying the work of God and therefore it is not illegal," Bear said.

Bear said that students can distinguish between accredited schools and fraudulent ones by doing research.

"Another problem is that some of the diploma mills will set up their own accrediting institution," Bear said. "The person just really needs to do a background check, and get more information than what they hear from the schools."

DETC has a listing of accredited distance education schools at http://www.detc.org.

02-06-98