by Nick Fishman

Talk about opening up a can of worms!  We’ve been expecting stories to surface about higher profile individuals representing that they earned degrees only for their current of future employers to discover that they were from fraudulent universities (often referred to as "diploma mills").  However, we never would have expected that the first major story to arise would involve a White House staffer and other federal government officials.  The story Lawyer: Gov’t Workers Got Fake Diplomas tells of at least 135 federal employees on the government payroll who represented themselves as graduates from universities that do not exist.

Diploma Mills have been springing up all over the internet and offer those with a couple of bucks the ability to claim that they received academic degrees that they in fact, did not.  We’ve seen this trend explode over the past five years and have been educating employers to beware of such representations.

What can an employer do?  If education is an important determining factor in your hiring process, conduct an employment verification.  This inexpensive step will allow you to determine if your applicant has a degree, the type of degree earned, the dates of attendance and sometimes even GPA.  These diploma mills are not exactly the best kept secret and we all have lists with those most often represented.   

This shouldn’t be the first time you have ever heard about Diploma Mills, but I can guarantee that it will not be the last.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.