4 ms·

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 obstac

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.

alttab 17y ago
I agree that a lot of universities are raising their tuition and basically selling debt to students (along with my experience that just because you have the same piece of paper I do doesn't mean you aren't an order of magnitude dumber). That said, diploma mills only dilute this problem even further. It is up to the employer to set their standards. The issue is probably less about what is necessary to do the job and more about finding an honest employee who has the balls to try to prove he's worth the gamble despite not having the requested education.
ghshephard 17y ago
Google ran an experiment for a while, in which they required their new hires to both A) Have a particular SAT score B) Have a fairly high grade from an accredited organization. I'd love to hear the results of that experiment, and see if there was any correlation between job performance and those two metrics.
jquery 17y ago
I assert that gaining admittance and 4 years of study is far more difficult than taking out a subsidized loan for ~30k (give or take). These con-artists with fake diplomas are riskier hires to their employers when compared to someone who had the tenacity to sweat time, tears, and years for the degree. If they weren't riskier, the market would reflect that reality and you would see employers clamoring for the cheaper labor of someone without a degree.
btilly 17y ago
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.
elblanco 17y ago
The problem is that the vast majority of the time, the people with the fake degrees also don't have any of the skills the degree "certifies" them as having. I've seen a few very notable cases where a person with a fake degree cost a company six figures in disastrous projects that relied on those people as having a basic education in their field. In the grand scheme of things, $20-30k over 4 years is not a whole hell of a lot of money. And this is coming from somebody that paid for college out-of-pocket while supporting a wife (who couldn't work at the time and also was going to school) and earning less than $20k/yr. Leaving school with that kind of debt is almost inconsequential since you'll likely get a job that pays you well enough to live decently and pay back whatever debt you have with extra left over to eat steak. Sure I had to suffer for a few (six) years to get my undegrad, but my first job out of school paid enough that I was able to live at a far better standard of living than I did during school, and still pay back the loans in about 4 years (and all the while, every year it got better and better as I got promotions and pay raises).

alttab 17y ago

I agree that a lot of universities are raising their tuition and basically selling debt to students (along with my experience that just because you have the same piece of paper I do doesn't mean you aren't an order of magnitude dumber). That said, diploma mills only dilute this problem even further. It is up to the employer to set their standards. The issue is probably less about what is necessary to do the job and more about finding an honest employee who has the balls to try to prove he's worth the gamble despite not having the requested education.

ghshephard 17y ago

Google ran an experiment for a while, in which they required their new hires to both A) Have a particular SAT score B) Have a fairly high grade from an accredited organization. I'd love to hear the results of that experiment, and see if there was any correlation between job performance and those two metrics.

jquery 17y ago

I assert that gaining admittance and 4 years of study is far more difficult than taking out a subsidized loan for ~30k (give or take). These con-artists with fake diplomas are riskier hires to their employers when compared to someone who had the tenacity to sweat time, tears, and years for the degree. If they weren't riskier, the market would reflect that reality and you would see employers clamoring for the cheaper labor of someone without a degree.

btilly 17y ago

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.

elblanco 17y ago

The problem is that the vast majority of the time, the people with the fake degrees also don't have any of the skills the degree "certifies" them as having. I've seen a few very notable cases where a person with a fake degree cost a company six figures in disastrous projects that relied on those people as having a basic education in their field. In the grand scheme of things, $20-30k over 4 years is not a whole hell of a lot of money. And this is coming from somebody that paid for college out-of-pocket while supporting a wife (who couldn't work at the time and also was going to school) and earning less than $20k/yr. Leaving school with that kind of debt is almost inconsequential since you'll likely get a job that pays you well enough to live decently and pay back whatever debt you have with extra left over to eat steak. Sure I had to suffer for a few (six) years to get my undegrad, but my first job out of school paid enough that I was able to live at a far better standard of living than I did during school, and still pay back the loans in about 4 years (and all the while, every year it got better and better as I got promotions and pay raises).