Degree Mills: The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas (review)

Ezell and Bear have written an eye-opening and enormously important book about degree fraud in higher education. Far from being a fringe activity with little relationship to the legitimate activities of educational institutions, the degree-mill problem they describe suggests a vast network of covert suppliers and willing buyers that brazenly subverts the gatekeeping role of academia.

The credentials being sold by these phony universities are not just fake MBA's for junior executives or bogus bachelor's degrees used to open doors to entry-level positions. Degree mills serve doctors, politicians, professors, and engineers: all people who took a shortcut by claiming a degree they had not earned. It is a profoundly disturbing story—and not just because of the scale of the problem that Ezell and Bear amply document. The deceptively innocent rationalizations made by those who use degree mills are chilling in their ethical equanimity.

Many faculty have encountered the student who claims ignorance regarding standards of academic integrity, even while admitting to palpable plagiarism. So there is an uncomfortable sense of familiarity in the explanation, given in a first-person appendix, of a high-level government worker who acquired her degrees from one of these mills. After a search of programs on the Internet, she found that Hamilton University would accept her previous experience as evidence of academic achievement. The institution required only an ethics course (which she completed in "a couple of weeks") and a thesis—20 pages dutifully researched and written over the next several months. For this she received a bachelor's and master's degree. So pleased was she with her achievement that she returned for her Ph.D., which was awarded after she completed a few additional requirements. She was shocked—shocked!—to discover that it was all a fraud. How was she to know?

Ezell and Bear argue quite convincingly that those who take the bait offered by degree mills are rarely innocent victims of unscrupulous con artists. Even someone with almost no knowledge of the legitimate higher education enterprise should be able to recognize the warning signs of a degree mill. For those who need a list, the authors present 92 deceptive tactics used by degree mills, ranging from false claims about accreditation to backdating diplomas, and argue that these comprise a comprehensive set of "red flags" that typically cluster around these spurious schools.

More often, however, such a list would be pointless for the typical degree mill student. "Common sense tells us that most people with an IQ higher than room temperature must at least suspect that a doctorate earned in two weeks, no questions asked, or a bachelor's degree that can be backdated to the date of one's choice, cannot be legitimate" (p. 110). These individuals are, rather, participants in the deception. When confronted with evidence that they have claimed an illegitimate credential, they offer rationalizations and justifications; but ultimately, Ezell and Bear state, nearly all know or should have known there was a problem.

Apart from the buyers and sellers, Ezell and Bear identify two additional groups that ensure the continued existence of degree mills. First, employers who require degrees but who do not take the time to ensure they are legitimate play a substantial role. The degree-mill scheme could not survive if the market for them was not made so lucrative by employers' lax monitoring of employees and applicants. The second group is the regulatory community, including the states and federal government, which has not seriously tackled the problem.

Despite clear evidence of fraudulent behavior and the financial burden degree mills impose on taxpayers (through grants and loan subsidies to students, for example), Ezell and Bear find few examples of the dogged prosecution that they argue is necessary to put a dent in this crime. For places where existing laws are insufficient, the authors supply...