9 ms·

What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

120 points by bootload 11y ago

cafard 11y ago
To summarize: contractors can bill the federal government at higher rates for PhDs, without respect to the origin or meaning of that degree, and pass on some of it to the employee, so these employees are getting PhDs in the most expedient way. The main difference between now and the 20th Century is the explosion of on-line schools and the expansion of the "national security community."
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  So (and I'm guessing here because I really can't stand to click on a Vice link) that a lot of those PhDs are in bullshit fields like "national security studies" or similar?
  - emidln 11y ago
    It seems worse than that from the article. A lot of PhDs are from non-accredited schools. Some of the PhDs are from a series of online "schools" that seem to be ran by the same man.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      Reminds me of a lot of mid-00s Army officers that I remember- a lot of the OCS crowd especially had bullshit online degrees from degree mills.
    - PeterisP 11y ago
      Why would that be a motivation to get a PhD then? I mean, for any billing issue, if you're contracting out a person with a non-accredited PhD then they do not have an accredited PhD and representing it that way is simply fraud; and from the side of customer/government asking for data on any "PhDs" including self-proclaimed, instead of accredited degrees would be simply ridiculous.
  - huac 11y ago
    here's the relevant image: https://news-images.vice.com/images/2016/01/27/doctors-of-doom-body-image-1453912893.jpg?resize=1000:*&output-quality=75 https://news-images.vice.com/images/2016/01/27/doctors-of-do... the analysis is pretty straightforward from there.
    - gruez 11y ago
      What's the reason behind the rise of "business admin & mgmt"?
      - p4bl0 11y ago
        My guess would be that it is easier to bullshit a diploma in "business admin & mgmt" than in law, literature, or sciences for examples.
        Nelson69 11y ago
        There is another axis that would be pretty interesting. I suspect that these "national security" types get a sizable and relatively automatic boost in pay for a PhD and it's likely not correlated to any performance or value. Top Secret America by Dana Priest (http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/dp/0316182206/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454004076&sr=1-1&keywords=top+secret+america http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...) is a somewhat interesting read on it. There are some politically angled results you can take from it but one of the most obvious non-political results is that the national security apparatus employs people that tend to be better paid, live in better areas and have all those benefits (better schools for their kids, less crime, etc..) They also seem to be disproportionately white men. If you squint your eyes just right, it looks an awful lot like a jobs program for white men. The book is a few years old but as I remember it I want to say the average pay for a top secret cleared generic 'analyst' was in the $150k+ range, more if you're in a valuable specialty. Then the real kicker, most of them justify their own jobs and contracts, oversight consists of reading that justification, which I guess isn't totally unusual for government work but since they're contractors it's a little odd.. It's not performance based.
  - volaski 11y ago
    Why can't you stand to click on a vice link?
  - dcposch 11y ago
    Vice runs vacuous clickbait sometimes, but they've gotten a LOT better in the last few years and they also do some excellent journalism now. In particular, their feature-length documentaries are consistently amazing, as is Vice on HBO. Shane Smith and Thomas Morton both have balls of titanium. They go places ordinary journalists would never go, figuratively and literally. Give them a second chance.
    - sedachv 11y ago
      > Give them a second chance. That is exactly what compulsive liars/sociopaths like Shane Smith want: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-truth-telling-has-history-of-lies/ http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-tr... The documentaries and reporting produced by Vice are entertaining, but their standards of reporting basically make them a hipster tabloid.
      - dtornabene 11y ago
        A Couple of things.... 1) The Daily Caller isn't exactly a noted truth teller itself 2) The author of that particular piece, Charles Johnson, is well known for being utterly without scruples whatsoever. He's also one of the purveyors of the extremely offensive "cuckservative" meme that popped up recently (hint: its white supremacist) which leads to #3... 3) Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here. Also, to back up the parent, yes, Vice does run a great deal of clickbait, but they also run things noone else will. I've read younger authors who I discovered on more mainstream sites that have had pieces published at Vice.
        sedachv 11y ago
        It is not like that is the only report relating to Vice to raise suspicions: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/vice-media-kit-warning-for-advertisers-25ad0600f61d#.c539wnnoa https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/vice-media-kit-warning-... http://gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-it-seems-1579711577 http://gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-it... > Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here. You can tell a lot about a person from their cofounders. McInnes was at Vice from 1994 to 2007. Vice was built on shock journalism, McInnes never hid his racism and homophobia: http://www.nypress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?avis=NP&date=20021008&category=NEWS&lopenr=310089998&Ref=AR&template=printart http://www.nypress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?avis=NP&date=20...
- mtberatwork 11y ago
  There has been a significant rise in advertising around the DC metro area for online schools. Usually the premise is the same: "get a degree|certification quickly in cyber-<insert field>|management". Degrees (not just PhDs), certifications, etc all equate to higher billable rates for the contractor. The contractor world is probably single-handedly keeping the certification industry afloat.
  - tedks 11y ago
    To be fair, when I travel outside the DC area I still see as many ads for for-profit schools. They're certainly a huge share of metro advertisements, probably the next down from weapons systems advertisements.
    - devonkim 11y ago
      A lot of these schools have historically targeted US military personnel all around the US and even abroad due to the perception of 1. Ignorance 2. funding per Montgomery GI Bill or other entitlements for service members. It's part of why the University of Phoenix was recently banned from trying to recruit US Army (or another service branch) near bases / camps I suspect.
- deleted 11y ago
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- p4bl0 11y ago
  I don't understand. Do you imply that in the US any organization can grant a PhD to someone? And/or that there is no control over the requirements to meet to get a PhD?
  - gherkin0 11y ago
    > I don't understand. Do you imply that in the US any organization can grant a PhD to someone? And/or that there is no control over the requirements to meet to get a PhD? In the US, the big distinction is between accredited schools and unaccredited schools. Probably any organization could grant a piece of paper called a "PhD" to someone, but not every organization could claim to be accredited by a legitimate accreditor. My understanding is a lot of the online-only/for-profit schools are accreddited by less the rigorous "national" accreditors. The traditional regional accreditors are more focused on academics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation...
    - p4bl0 11y ago
      Okay, thanks!
- analog31 11y ago
  This is true in some other fields as well, such as K-12 education. The typical teacher contract guarantees an automatic salary bump for getting an advanced degree,
philodendron 11y ago
I'm bothered by the lack of labels on the y-axis of that graph. I don't hate Vice, but in my mind their credibility just went down a peg or two.
hamiltonsPple 11y ago
Skimmed article, not really getting the outrage. Since when do you need a "real" PhD to do the work described there? If the issue is that the govt is obliged to pay the contractors higher for people with PhDs then, by all menas, let's complain. Otherwise this is just some pointless rending of clothes
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  I don't think the government is obliged to pay the contractors more for people with PhDs, but it does choose to.
ra1n85 11y ago
I'm also intrigued, and seemingly let down, by folks with degrees in "Cyber {defense|analysis|warfare}". These degrees are always laid out on a resume with other super-sexy sounding credentials and accolades. Unfortunately, the interviews always seem to reveal a lot of (sometimes serious) technical gaps. The only reliable indicators I've come to find for technical and engineering acumen are curiosity and experience. These sexy sounding degrees are starting to become indicators of candidates that don't meet requirements.
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  Yes presumably this whole thing unravels when you interview someone and say 'oh great you have PhD - can you tell me about your top three peer-reviewed papers'
  - HarryHirsch 11y ago
    Assuming that you are permitted to unravel the ruse. If your company's purpose is to suck on the Federal teat, such actions are discouraged. Just look next door at the Theranos thread! For the better of ten years, asking hard questions about Theranos was discouraged.
- TACIXAT 11y ago
  There is a certain school in my area that offers a Masters in Cyber Security. We have come to learn through interviews that people with this degree know very little about practical security, reverse engineering, and exploitation. I'm sure it helps them get a sweet government job though.
  - grkvlt 11y ago
    Of course you don't need to know how to write shellcode, or have in-depth knowledge of anti-debugger reversing tricks, to write a very useful and robust security policy for an organisation, or manage a global incident response team. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the degree just because it doesn't teach 'practical' security. It's the same story with Computer Science degrees, which don't teach about source control or agile software methodologies, since these 'practical' subjects aren't really anything to do with CS.
mcguire 11y ago
"He adds that no one counseled him not to attend, and nobody has questioned his right to call himself a doctor." This is the second or third article I've read (from Vice) on this subject, and there's never any discussion of the process of getting a PhD. You don't get one for taking classes, or for taking tests. If I can't find a copy of your dissertation and at least one published article, I'm very much going to question your doctorhood.
- pc86 11y ago
  I admittedly do not know much about post-baccalaureate academia. If a non-accredited school in fact does offer a PhD simply for taking classes, can you call yourself doctor? What about a non-accredited school that still requires a dissertation but 99% of those submitted are approved? I am assuming that an accredited school handing out PhDs like this would lose their accreditation but maybe that's not the case. I'm just not sure under what circumstances it's a legitimate decision to say "You may have a PhD but you're not really a doctor."
  - virusduck 11y ago
    I'd say a majority of accredited schools also have very high dissertation acceptance rates. That is, you have been counseled by your adviser and other professors (a thesis committee) as to how things are going. They typically give you advice and want you to succeed. Those that do not heed this advice do not get advised to turn in a dissertation.
    - derf_ 11y ago
      This is correct. When I was a Ph.D student I was told that it was very rare for someone to fail their thesis defense, because their advisor will not let them defend until they know they are going to pass. It does happen, but it takes a special kind of effort and means your advisor screwed up.
      - mcguire 11y ago
        Oh, yeah. If you fail at your defense, your adviser is going to be permanently embarrassed. As in, not being able to show his face in the faculty lounge embarrassed. Universally mocked. I personally had to go through the proposal phase twice and that was bad enough.
pmorici 11y ago
This sounds like a problem with how contracts are written. They should be requiring that any degrees cited to fill contract qualification requirements come from an accredited university. That would at least take care of the worst cases. Some accredited schools with well known and prestigious names also operate diploma mills because they know large companies will pay for students to get advanced degrees. In the wider sense I don't think this is a problem just in government though. Dubious and outright false credentials are a problem in industry too (ie: An HP CEO had to resign after it was found his advanced degree was fabricated.) The bigger question maybe that if the person can perform at a certain level does it really matter what degree they have? At the same time dishonesty shouldn't be allowed just because the current system isn't ideal.
- patorjk 11y ago
  Sometimes the big name schools have an accredited ungraduate program, but an unaccredited masters/phd program.
  - mcguire 11y ago
    I cannot find any information about accreditation at UT Austin (other than [1], which is out of date). I once had a discussion with someone from the academic staff of the CS department (name redacted to protect the guilty), which I may have misunderstood or be misremembering, but included a statement to the effect of, "we aren't accredited by anyone; they're all following us." (They did have an external visiting committee who reviewed and made comments on the curriculum.) [1] https://cns.utexas.edu/undergraduate-education/academic-records/sacs-accreditation https://cns.utexas.edu/undergraduate-education/academic-reco...
pc86 11y ago
Can someone explain why "100% online" is used as a clear negative factor? What makes physical proximity to a whiteboard a better indicator of academic achievement? The ability and willingness to have a family, a full-time job, and earn an advanced degree should not be a negative signal.
- netcan 11y ago
  Nothing inherent. But… Whiteboard schools are older and most of the currently higher reputation institutions are mostly physical. Many online-only schools are lower reputation, newer, or lower tier. Also, if the school has a cynical business model of serving students interested entirely on the piece of paper saying they attended. You could come up with similarly derogatory things to say about Pacific Island institutions, nigh schools, etc. It's a correlation not a causation. I think there's also reality to the task of attaining what we think of as a valid Masters Degree of PHD. A family, and a full-time job are very demanding pursuits. I commend anyone who can achieve that kind of degree with those kinds of commitments. But, I also think it's suspicious when schools see their core offering as something suitable for a full time working family man to get a masters degree in 18 months in his spare time, especially if the area tends to subjectivity.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- rl3 11y ago
  In principle there's nothing wrong with the concept of online degrees. In practice, it's currently a complete cesspool of low-quality for-profit degree mills. I would argue that MOOCs from top tier universities far, far exceed the average online for-profit in terms of quality of content. It's ironic, considering they're free. The caveat of course is you don't get a degree, though many have options for certifying you took the class. In my opinion, a bullshit degree is worse than no degree. The person with no degree is relying purely on skills and experience. The person with the online degree meanwhile may be of questionable caliber. I have sympathy for people who people attain online degrees out of necessity and are fully aware they're just getting a piece of paper to satsify whatever arbitrary bureaucratic requirements. For example, it's not uncommon for a minimum level of education to be retroactively forced upon already-competent employees. The questionable caliber part comes into play when you have people who fail to realize that their obviously poor-quality online school is, well, just that.
netcan 11y ago
There are a lot of ways degrees can be bogus. With online education seemingly at the nexus of technology, timing, investor interest & consumer demand we're hearing a lot about it lately. Most astute commentators spend some time on the question of credentialing. It's one of these weird issues where the new thing needs a good solution, but when you look at the old thing you see that it has a pretty terrible solution and that the problem might not be solvable. I went to a well respected school. A pass in an arts degree "Arts Degree" (meaning humanities, mostly) at that school was basically available to anyone willing to show up, turn in 20k-30k words per semester (regardless of quality) and attend 3-4 tutorial per week without preparation. They just don't normally fail someone who completes the requirements, with a very liberal definition of that concept. It's not like math where you can either solve the problem in the exam or you can't. They accepted that subjectivity and left a large loophole wide open. At the same time, very few students actually took advantage of that, with prior intent. Most of the learning opportunity was ungraded. There was 4-500 weekly pages of required reading on Kant, North African Medieval History, the history of ideas in cognitive psychology or high classical interpretations of the allegory of the cave. If you showed up at lectures, tutorials and discussions ready to discuss these materials every day you would probably experience learning that is unlikely to occur outside a university. The mechanism for making sure you actually learn is always some degree of lax. That's within a University that has no interest, need or intent to exchange pieces of paper for money. Throw in globalization, an infinite number of institutions , the monetary incentives faced by bottom tier schools, etc and you have a big chunk of bogus degrees. So… We can open the door and turn the lights on a lot of rooms with a lot of sordid activity. We'll get to see a lot of things we'd rather not see with knickers indignantly bunched up around ankles. I seriously doubt the "Intelligence Community" is unique in any way. It's tricky shedding light on problems we don't know how to solve.
deleted 11y ago
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timtadh 11y ago
This tracks well with a report I heard this week on declining mean salaries in the federal government versus industry. As the government pays less, has declining pensions, and is under constant threat of "shutdown" it isn't surprising that the best people would rather look elsewhere. That doesn't even factor in people choosing not to work for the government for political and moral reasons. Sadly, this means that the bureaucracy will increase and become more petty. People will become more concerned about protecting their jobs and less about doing them well. Because, government work on a resume will become a "bad smell" making it hard for government workers to find a job in the private sector. Who wants to hire someone with a fake PhD? Only the government.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
Back in the 90s I was working for a very large IT contractor on a very large federal government contract. The place sucked, but that's another story. I started as a senior dev, and within a year or so moved up 3 or 4 levels. Even after moving up, after a year I couldn't do that no more. I wanted to build stuff. When I told them I was going to leave, we worked out a deal: I'd pick a team of 2. We'd work on a project with a couple of other large government agencies. Folks would leave us alone. We'd get shit done. So we did. In six months we delivered the project. I worked mostly from home. We 3 were delivering at a rate that was greater than the 10-20 person teams at the other agencies. It was sad. After six months, I was getting ready to bail, but they beat me to the punch. They told me I could no longer be working at the job I was doing. Why? Because I was self-taught. Needed at least a Master's degree, preferably a PhD. It really didn't bother me since I was leaving anyway. On the way out, though, I spoke to the number 3 guy on the contract. He asked me about a few of the PhDs I had working for me. "They're pretty good, I guess. But this one guy? He's so arrogant nobody can work with him" The guy basically told me that they had to fill seats with PhDs to meet the GSA schedule, didn't matter whether they did anything or not. I liked all the people I worked with, but I'd never voluntarily go back to that kind of idiocy.
stvswn 11y ago
FWIW, this phenomenon is not a "US National Security Community" thing, it's a government thing (although quality control can vary). I saw it in the Army -- enlisted Soliders get a certain number of "points" towards their promotions for completing coursework and obtaining a degree. So, they find the most expedient methods -- and for-profit schools that catered to this nonsense were all over. An entire platoon could literally pass around the same papers and get through an associate's degree together. "Criminal justice" was a popular one, for some reason. I have lots of teachers in my family. They get a big pay bump for a Master's degree (had to be accredited, admittedly, so that's a little better). If the pay bump is the same no matter which school you go to, why not take the path of least resistance, especially when you're working full-time and raising a family? They all have online degrees from one of the local state colleges that caters to this market. I don't think they try to argue that they are better teachers for it. It's just a way to hustle for more money (and can you blame them?) If you have to make a one-sized-fits-all rule about "this degree is worth this amount of money," you're going to run into these issues.
daveloyall 11y ago
> VICE News accessed information about the educational backgrounds of more than 90,000 people who work in the national security domain and possess a Top Secret clearance. That's the data from the OPM breach. Interesting.
- stonogo 11y ago
  That's a pretty bold unsubstantiated claim you're making there.
  - daveloyall 11y ago
    It's purposefully exactly as bold and unsubstantiated as the claim vice makes. Ah, crap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... says 18-21.5 million. I was way off. :(
    - stonogo 11y ago
      It's far more likely that many government contracts and departments have their team's qualifications on record due to government accountability guidelines. While it hasn't been proven who exactly grabbed the OPM data, the chances are pretty low that someone with the capability to undertake this sort of work would share the spoils with an organization like VICE.
- Laaw 11y ago
  I don't think so, I believe all this information is publicly available, though anonymized.
niels_olson 11y ago
When did Vice become a source of hard-hitting investigative journalism?

120 points by bootload 11y ago

To summarize: contractors can bill the federal government at higher rates for PhDs, without respect to the origin or meaning of that degree, and pass on some of it to the employee, so these employees are getting PhDs in the most expedient way. The main difference between now and the 20th Century is the explosion of on-line schools and the expansion of the "national security community."

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
So (and I'm guessing here because I really can't stand to click on a Vice link) that a lot of those PhDs are in bullshit fields like "national security studies" or similar?
- emidln 11y ago
  It seems worse than that from the article. A lot of PhDs are from non-accredited schools. Some of the PhDs are from a series of online "schools" that seem to be ran by the same man.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    Reminds me of a lot of mid-00s Army officers that I remember- a lot of the OCS crowd especially had bullshit online degrees from degree mills.
  - PeterisP 11y ago
    Why would that be a motivation to get a PhD then? I mean, for any billing issue, if you're contracting out a person with a non-accredited PhD then they do not have an accredited PhD and representing it that way is simply fraud; and from the side of customer/government asking for data on any "PhDs" including self-proclaimed, instead of accredited degrees would be simply ridiculous.
- huac 11y ago
  here's the relevant image: https://news-images.vice.com/images/2016/01/27/doctors-of-doom-body-image-1453912893.jpg?resize=1000:*&output-quality=75 https://news-images.vice.com/images/2016/01/27/doctors-of-do... the analysis is pretty straightforward from there.
  - gruez 11y ago
    What's the reason behind the rise of "business admin & mgmt"?
    - p4bl0 11y ago
      My guess would be that it is easier to bullshit a diploma in "business admin & mgmt" than in law, literature, or sciences for examples.
      - Nelson69 11y ago
        There is another axis that would be pretty interesting. I suspect that these "national security" types get a sizable and relatively automatic boost in pay for a PhD and it's likely not correlated to any performance or value. Top Secret America by Dana Priest (http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/dp/0316182206/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1454004076&sr=1-1&keywords=top+secret+america http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...) is a somewhat interesting read on it. There are some politically angled results you can take from it but one of the most obvious non-political results is that the national security apparatus employs people that tend to be better paid, live in better areas and have all those benefits (better schools for their kids, less crime, etc..) They also seem to be disproportionately white men. If you squint your eyes just right, it looks an awful lot like a jobs program for white men. The book is a few years old but as I remember it I want to say the average pay for a top secret cleared generic 'analyst' was in the $150k+ range, more if you're in a valuable specialty. Then the real kicker, most of them justify their own jobs and contracts, oversight consists of reading that justification, which I guess isn't totally unusual for government work but since they're contractors it's a little odd.. It's not performance based.
- volaski 11y ago
  Why can't you stand to click on a vice link?
- dcposch 11y ago
  Vice runs vacuous clickbait sometimes, but they've gotten a LOT better in the last few years and they also do some excellent journalism now. In particular, their feature-length documentaries are consistently amazing, as is Vice on HBO. Shane Smith and Thomas Morton both have balls of titanium. They go places ordinary journalists would never go, figuratively and literally. Give them a second chance.
  - sedachv 11y ago
    > Give them a second chance. That is exactly what compulsive liars/sociopaths like Shane Smith want: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-truth-telling-has-history-of-lies/ http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-tr... The documentaries and reporting produced by Vice are entertaining, but their standards of reporting basically make them a hipster tabloid.
    - dtornabene 11y ago
      A Couple of things.... 1) The Daily Caller isn't exactly a noted truth teller itself 2) The author of that particular piece, Charles Johnson, is well known for being utterly without scruples whatsoever. He's also one of the purveyors of the extremely offensive "cuckservative" meme that popped up recently (hint: its white supremacist) which leads to #3... 3) Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here. Also, to back up the parent, yes, Vice does run a great deal of clickbait, but they also run things noone else will. I've read younger authors who I discovered on more mainstream sites that have had pieces published at Vice.
      - sedachv 11y ago
        It is not like that is the only report relating to Vice to raise suspicions: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/vice-media-kit-warning-for-advertisers-25ad0600f61d#.c539wnnoa https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/vice-media-kit-warning-... http://gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-it-seems-1579711577 http://gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-it... > Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here. You can tell a lot about a person from their cofounders. McInnes was at Vice from 1994 to 2007. Vice was built on shock journalism, McInnes never hid his racism and homophobia: http://www.nypress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?avis=NP&date=20021008&category=NEWS&lopenr=310089998&Ref=AR&template=printart http://www.nypress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?avis=NP&date=20...
mtberatwork 11y ago
There has been a significant rise in advertising around the DC metro area for online schools. Usually the premise is the same: "get a degree|certification quickly in cyber-<insert field>|management". Degrees (not just PhDs), certifications, etc all equate to higher billable rates for the contractor. The contractor world is probably single-handedly keeping the certification industry afloat.
- tedks 11y ago
  To be fair, when I travel outside the DC area I still see as many ads for for-profit schools. They're certainly a huge share of metro advertisements, probably the next down from weapons systems advertisements.
  - devonkim 11y ago
    A lot of these schools have historically targeted US military personnel all around the US and even abroad due to the perception of 1. Ignorance 2. funding per Montgomery GI Bill or other entitlements for service members. It's part of why the University of Phoenix was recently banned from trying to recruit US Army (or another service branch) near bases / camps I suspect.
deleted 11y ago
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p4bl0 11y ago
I don't understand. Do you imply that in the US any organization can grant a PhD to someone? And/or that there is no control over the requirements to meet to get a PhD?
- gherkin0 11y ago
  > I don't understand. Do you imply that in the US any organization can grant a PhD to someone? And/or that there is no control over the requirements to meet to get a PhD? In the US, the big distinction is between accredited schools and unaccredited schools. Probably any organization could grant a piece of paper called a "PhD" to someone, but not every organization could claim to be accredited by a legitimate accreditor. My understanding is a lot of the online-only/for-profit schools are accreddited by less the rigorous "national" accreditors. The traditional regional accreditors are more focused on academics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation...
  - p4bl0 11y ago
    Okay, thanks!
analog31 11y ago
This is true in some other fields as well, such as K-12 education. The typical teacher contract guarantees an automatic salary bump for getting an advanced degree,

philodendron 11y ago

I'm bothered by the lack of labels on the y-axis of that graph. I don't hate Vice, but in my mind their credibility just went down a peg or two.

hamiltonsPple 11y ago

Skimmed article, not really getting the outrage. Since when do you need a "real" PhD to do the work described there? If the issue is that the govt is obliged to pay the contractors higher for people with PhDs then, by all menas, let's complain. Otherwise this is just some pointless rending of clothes

chrisseaton 11y ago
I don't think the government is obliged to pay the contractors more for people with PhDs, but it does choose to.

ra1n85 11y ago

I'm also intrigued, and seemingly let down, by folks with degrees in "Cyber {defense|analysis|warfare}". These degrees are always laid out on a resume with other super-sexy sounding credentials and accolades. Unfortunately, the interviews always seem to reveal a lot of (sometimes serious) technical gaps. The only reliable indicators I've come to find for technical and engineering acumen are curiosity and experience. These sexy sounding degrees are starting to become indicators of candidates that don't meet requirements.

chrisseaton 11y ago
Yes presumably this whole thing unravels when you interview someone and say 'oh great you have PhD - can you tell me about your top three peer-reviewed papers'
- HarryHirsch 11y ago
  Assuming that you are permitted to unravel the ruse. If your company's purpose is to suck on the Federal teat, such actions are discouraged. Just look next door at the Theranos thread! For the better of ten years, asking hard questions about Theranos was discouraged.
TACIXAT 11y ago
There is a certain school in my area that offers a Masters in Cyber Security. We have come to learn through interviews that people with this degree know very little about practical security, reverse engineering, and exploitation. I'm sure it helps them get a sweet government job though.
- grkvlt 11y ago
  Of course you don't need to know how to write shellcode, or have in-depth knowledge of anti-debugger reversing tricks, to write a very useful and robust security policy for an organisation, or manage a global incident response team. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the degree just because it doesn't teach 'practical' security. It's the same story with Computer Science degrees, which don't teach about source control or agile software methodologies, since these 'practical' subjects aren't really anything to do with CS.

mcguire 11y ago

"He adds that no one counseled him not to attend, and nobody has questioned his right to call himself a doctor." This is the second or third article I've read (from Vice) on this subject, and there's never any discussion of the process of getting a PhD. You don't get one for taking classes, or for taking tests. If I can't find a copy of your dissertation and at least one published article, I'm very much going to question your doctorhood.

pc86 11y ago
I admittedly do not know much about post-baccalaureate academia. If a non-accredited school in fact does offer a PhD simply for taking classes, can you call yourself doctor? What about a non-accredited school that still requires a dissertation but 99% of those submitted are approved? I am assuming that an accredited school handing out PhDs like this would lose their accreditation but maybe that's not the case. I'm just not sure under what circumstances it's a legitimate decision to say "You may have a PhD but you're not really a doctor."
- virusduck 11y ago
  I'd say a majority of accredited schools also have very high dissertation acceptance rates. That is, you have been counseled by your adviser and other professors (a thesis committee) as to how things are going. They typically give you advice and want you to succeed. Those that do not heed this advice do not get advised to turn in a dissertation.
  - derf_ 11y ago
    This is correct. When I was a Ph.D student I was told that it was very rare for someone to fail their thesis defense, because their advisor will not let them defend until they know they are going to pass. It does happen, but it takes a special kind of effort and means your advisor screwed up.
    - mcguire 11y ago
      Oh, yeah. If you fail at your defense, your adviser is going to be permanently embarrassed. As in, not being able to show his face in the faculty lounge embarrassed. Universally mocked. I personally had to go through the proposal phase twice and that was bad enough.

pmorici 11y ago

This sounds like a problem with how contracts are written. They should be requiring that any degrees cited to fill contract qualification requirements come from an accredited university. That would at least take care of the worst cases. Some accredited schools with well known and prestigious names also operate diploma mills because they know large companies will pay for students to get advanced degrees. In the wider sense I don't think this is a problem just in government though. Dubious and outright false credentials are a problem in industry too (ie: An HP CEO had to resign after it was found his advanced degree was fabricated.) The bigger question maybe that if the person can perform at a certain level does it really matter what degree they have? At the same time dishonesty shouldn't be allowed just because the current system isn't ideal.

patorjk 11y ago
Sometimes the big name schools have an accredited ungraduate program, but an unaccredited masters/phd program.
- mcguire 11y ago
  I cannot find any information about accreditation at UT Austin (other than [1], which is out of date). I once had a discussion with someone from the academic staff of the CS department (name redacted to protect the guilty), which I may have misunderstood or be misremembering, but included a statement to the effect of, "we aren't accredited by anyone; they're all following us." (They did have an external visiting committee who reviewed and made comments on the curriculum.) [1] https://cns.utexas.edu/undergraduate-education/academic-records/sacs-accreditation https://cns.utexas.edu/undergraduate-education/academic-reco...

pc86 11y ago

Can someone explain why "100% online" is used as a clear negative factor? What makes physical proximity to a whiteboard a better indicator of academic achievement? The ability and willingness to have a family, a full-time job, and earn an advanced degree should not be a negative signal.

netcan 11y ago
Nothing inherent. But… Whiteboard schools are older and most of the currently higher reputation institutions are mostly physical. Many online-only schools are lower reputation, newer, or lower tier. Also, if the school has a cynical business model of serving students interested entirely on the piece of paper saying they attended. You could come up with similarly derogatory things to say about Pacific Island institutions, nigh schools, etc. It's a correlation not a causation. I think there's also reality to the task of attaining what we think of as a valid Masters Degree of PHD. A family, and a full-time job are very demanding pursuits. I commend anyone who can achieve that kind of degree with those kinds of commitments. But, I also think it's suspicious when schools see their core offering as something suitable for a full time working family man to get a masters degree in 18 months in his spare time, especially if the area tends to subjectivity.
- deleted 11y ago
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rl3 11y ago
In principle there's nothing wrong with the concept of online degrees. In practice, it's currently a complete cesspool of low-quality for-profit degree mills. I would argue that MOOCs from top tier universities far, far exceed the average online for-profit in terms of quality of content. It's ironic, considering they're free. The caveat of course is you don't get a degree, though many have options for certifying you took the class. In my opinion, a bullshit degree is worse than no degree. The person with no degree is relying purely on skills and experience. The person with the online degree meanwhile may be of questionable caliber. I have sympathy for people who people attain online degrees out of necessity and are fully aware they're just getting a piece of paper to satsify whatever arbitrary bureaucratic requirements. For example, it's not uncommon for a minimum level of education to be retroactively forced upon already-competent employees. The questionable caliber part comes into play when you have people who fail to realize that their obviously poor-quality online school is, well, just that.

netcan 11y ago

There are a lot of ways degrees can be bogus. With online education seemingly at the nexus of technology, timing, investor interest & consumer demand we're hearing a lot about it lately. Most astute commentators spend some time on the question of credentialing. It's one of these weird issues where the new thing needs a good solution, but when you look at the old thing you see that it has a pretty terrible solution and that the problem might not be solvable. I went to a well respected school. A pass in an arts degree "Arts Degree" (meaning humanities, mostly) at that school was basically available to anyone willing to show up, turn in 20k-30k words per semester (regardless of quality) and attend 3-4 tutorial per week without preparation. They just don't normally fail someone who completes the requirements, with a very liberal definition of that concept. It's not like math where you can either solve the problem in the exam or you can't. They accepted that subjectivity and left a large loophole wide open. At the same time, very few students actually took advantage of that, with prior intent. Most of the learning opportunity was ungraded. There was 4-500 weekly pages of required reading on Kant, North African Medieval History, the history of ideas in cognitive psychology or high classical interpretations of the allegory of the cave. If you showed up at lectures, tutorials and discussions ready to discuss these materials every day you would probably experience learning that is unlikely to occur outside a university. The mechanism for making sure you actually learn is always some degree of lax. That's within a University that has no interest, need or intent to exchange pieces of paper for money. Throw in globalization, an infinite number of institutions , the monetary incentives faced by bottom tier schools, etc and you have a big chunk of bogus degrees. So… We can open the door and turn the lights on a lot of rooms with a lot of sordid activity. We'll get to see a lot of things we'd rather not see with knickers indignantly bunched up around ankles. I seriously doubt the "Intelligence Community" is unique in any way. It's tricky shedding light on problems we don't know how to solve.

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timtadh 11y ago

This tracks well with a report I heard this week on declining mean salaries in the federal government versus industry. As the government pays less, has declining pensions, and is under constant threat of "shutdown" it isn't surprising that the best people would rather look elsewhere. That doesn't even factor in people choosing not to work for the government for political and moral reasons. Sadly, this means that the bureaucracy will increase and become more petty. People will become more concerned about protecting their jobs and less about doing them well. Because, government work on a resume will become a "bad smell" making it hard for government workers to find a job in the private sector. Who wants to hire someone with a fake PhD? Only the government.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

Back in the 90s I was working for a very large IT contractor on a very large federal government contract. The place sucked, but that's another story. I started as a senior dev, and within a year or so moved up 3 or 4 levels. Even after moving up, after a year I couldn't do that no more. I wanted to build stuff. When I told them I was going to leave, we worked out a deal: I'd pick a team of 2. We'd work on a project with a couple of other large government agencies. Folks would leave us alone. We'd get shit done. So we did. In six months we delivered the project. I worked mostly from home. We 3 were delivering at a rate that was greater than the 10-20 person teams at the other agencies. It was sad. After six months, I was getting ready to bail, but they beat me to the punch. They told me I could no longer be working at the job I was doing. Why? Because I was self-taught. Needed at least a Master's degree, preferably a PhD. It really didn't bother me since I was leaving anyway. On the way out, though, I spoke to the number 3 guy on the contract. He asked me about a few of the PhDs I had working for me. "They're pretty good, I guess. But this one guy? He's so arrogant nobody can work with him" The guy basically told me that they had to fill seats with PhDs to meet the GSA schedule, didn't matter whether they did anything or not. I liked all the people I worked with, but I'd never voluntarily go back to that kind of idiocy.

stvswn 11y ago

FWIW, this phenomenon is not a "US National Security Community" thing, it's a government thing (although quality control can vary). I saw it in the Army -- enlisted Soliders get a certain number of "points" towards their promotions for completing coursework and obtaining a degree. So, they find the most expedient methods -- and for-profit schools that catered to this nonsense were all over. An entire platoon could literally pass around the same papers and get through an associate's degree together. "Criminal justice" was a popular one, for some reason. I have lots of teachers in my family. They get a big pay bump for a Master's degree (had to be accredited, admittedly, so that's a little better). If the pay bump is the same no matter which school you go to, why not take the path of least resistance, especially when you're working full-time and raising a family? They all have online degrees from one of the local state colleges that caters to this market. I don't think they try to argue that they are better teachers for it. It's just a way to hustle for more money (and can you blame them?) If you have to make a one-sized-fits-all rule about "this degree is worth this amount of money," you're going to run into these issues.

daveloyall 11y ago

> VICE News accessed information about the educational backgrounds of more than 90,000 people who work in the national security domain and possess a Top Secret clearance. That's the data from the OPM breach. Interesting.

stonogo 11y ago
That's a pretty bold unsubstantiated claim you're making there.
- daveloyall 11y ago
  It's purposefully exactly as bold and unsubstantiated as the claim vice makes. Ah, crap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... says 18-21.5 million. I was way off. :(
  - stonogo 11y ago
    It's far more likely that many government contracts and departments have their team's qualifications on record due to government accountability guidelines. While it hasn't been proven who exactly grabbed the OPM data, the chances are pretty low that someone with the capability to undertake this sort of work would share the spoils with an organization like VICE.
Laaw 11y ago
I don't think so, I believe all this information is publicly available, though anonymized.

niels_olson 11y ago

When did Vice become a source of hard-hitting investigative journalism?