Verifying College Degrees: It’s Quick and Simple & Sometimes You Learn That a Candidate Is a Fraud

Summary:

• Faking college degrees occurs more often many people think. We periodically discover it during retained search assignments that we conduct.
• We have found seemingly good candidates in fairly senior positions at both well-known and little-known companies who have falsified their degrees, some with 20+ years of experience.
• It is very simple to confirm a degree, and at the very least, it is a simple integrity check that should be conducted prior to hiring. If the candidate lies about a degree, can you trust anything else on their resume or that they tell you?

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I run a retained executive search firm.? On a recent search assignment we conducted to find the VP/Manufacturing for a $15-million maker of industrial subcomponents, we found that two prospective candidates had falsified their degrees.

This was far from the first time we’ve experienced this.? We periodically find that candidates have faked degrees.? Often, these are people 25 or 30 years past their college years, and who are working at major companies.? They’ve gotten away with it for years.?

There have been some high profile degree-faking embarrassments over the years.? Perhaps the most embarrassing one occurred when it was discovered that Marilee Jones, the MIT Admissions Dean from 1998 to 2007, claimed degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Union College and Albany Medical College.? In truth, she had only briefly attended one of those schools, RPI, as a part-time student.? MIT said that prior to that, they only occasionally checked prospective employees’ credentials.? Since then, they have verified all degrees.

Many companies hire hurriedly, without doing their due diligence.? Some companies, perhaps, feel that whether or not a 48-year-old with a 25-year track record has a degree is irrelevant.? That could be true in many cases, especially if the occupation does not require professional licensure.? But if someone falsifies their degree, can you trust anything else that they say?? Checking a degree is a simple integrity check.

Confirming Degrees Online:? Confirming a degree can often be done in minutes, online.? If you have the candidate’s full name, year of graduation and date of birth, most of the time you can confirm that prospective employee’s degree online at National Student Clearinghouse (www.studentclearinghouse.org).? Most colleges and universities provide enrollment and graduation information access to this secure site.? Confirmation is often instant, although sometimes it takes a day or two for the school to research their records, particularly if the candidate is many years past graduation.? Cost per confirmation is usually in the range of $10 to $30.?

Some schools do not provide information to the National Student Clearinghouse, and you will either have to call, email or fax those schools to get confirmation.? Some require a signed release from the candidate before they will give out this information.

To avoid candidates’ fears of age discrimination or identity theft, I give them the choice of giving me their date of birth and having me confirm their degree online, or of not giving me their personal information and allowing them to contact their school, and having the school mail confirmation directly to me.

Forging Diplomas & Transcripts Is Easy with Today’s Technology – Make Sure You Get Your Confirmation from the School:? An officer at the Registrar’s office at RPI told me that they had recently had an employer send them a transcript, reputedly coming from RPI, that the employer had been given by a prospective employee.? The prospective employee sent the employer the physical transcript after RPI searched their records and found no record of the candidate attending the university.? The person at their Registrar’s office told me that the transcript was beautifully done – it was an exact replica of one of their transcripts, down to the type size and font.? The only difference was that it wasn’t printed on their unique transcript paper, something that only someone working in their Registrar’s office would notice.? It was a fantastic forgery.

RPI also told me they get calls to confirm claims of people earning nursing degrees at their school, and they have never offered nursing in their 150+ years of existence.

There are numerous internet businesses selling fake transcripts and diplomas (check out phonydiploma.com for one example).? In addition, anyone with a partial transcript and some computer graphics skills can falsify a transcript in a couple of hours.

If a degree confirmation or transcript is mailed to you, make sure that the envelope arrives to you with a postmark from the school’s location, that the transcript envelope is sealed, and that the document has the university seal on it.? If you have any question at all about its authenticity, call the school’s registrar’s office.

Schools Make Mistakes – Check with the Candidate if the School Can’t Confirm a Degree.? Probably over half of the time that we’ve been unable to confirm a degree, the college or university has made a mistake.? Whenever a school or the National Student Clearinghouse is unable to confirm a degree, I contact the candidate and tell them this, and then ask them to contact their school.? The candidate can then contact the school and if the school did make an error, the registrar’s office will call you and embarrassingly tell you that the candidate graduated.? In these cases, we still call the registrar’s general office phone number back to make sure the phone call we received wasn’t a dummy call, and then ask for them to send written proof of graduation.

Diploma Mills & Unaccredited Universities

In addition to falsifying credentials, some candidates list degrees from unaccredited universities on their resumes.? Almost all of these are diploma mills that issue degrees after a supposed review of the candidate’s life experience, or for a combination of a life experience review and some minimal online coursework.? These universities have names that make them sound like real universities – they often have a name that is very similar to a real school, such as LaSalle University of Louisiana (not to be confused with the real LaSalle in Pennsylvania), or fancy British-sounding names like Suffield University.

These diploma mills may have web sites that can make them look like legitimate universities at first glance, and they almost always claim accreditation.? They are, however, accredited by phony offshore accreditation bodies.?

You can check out whether a college or university is legitimately accredited in the United States by looking it up on the Council for Higher Education Accreditation web site (www.chea.org).

Unaccredited Christian Colleges Are Usually Legitimate Schools: Some Christian colleges are unaccredited, and these are not diploma mills.? They are unaccredited by their own choice, because they don’t want to follow a number of government requirements. These colleges provide a legitimate education and students attend classes at these colleges for four years to earn a bachelor’s degree.? The candidate may not be able to get certain professional licenses because their degree is unaccredited.? If you have a candidate with a degree from an unaccredited Christian school that is unfamiliar to you, research it carefully to make sure that it is not a diploma mill.? It is usually not difficult to distinguish an unaccredited Christian College (many were called Bible Colleges in days past) from a diploma mill.

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The common sense rules apply when it comes to diploma mills, and degree-confirming in general.? If something doesn’t sound familiar, check it out.? If the school name is unusual to you, research it.? If you’ve never heard of a college granting an engineering degree or MBA or other type of degree as listed on the candidate’s resume, look it up or call the school.?

One prospect I spoke to claimed that he had a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from a small Michigan Catholic college.? I had never seen a resume listing an engineering degree from that school, so I checked their web site.? I found no engineering program, so I called the school.? They told me that they had had a variant of an engineering program at one point, but had never granted a degree in the field in which the candidate claimed he had earned his degree.?

It turned out that the candidate had never attended the college – a search of their records indicated that he had only once requested a brochure from them. ?