General Discussion

xchrom

(108,903 posts) Mon Jun 18, 2012, 06:09 AM Jun 2012

The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas {your dr?}

http://www.alternet.org/books/155864/does_your_doctor_have_a_fake_degree_the_billion-dollar_industry_that_has_sold_over_a_million_fake_diplomas/

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***SNIP

Consider, for instance, these five things:

• There are more than 3,300 unrecognized universities, worldwide, many of them outright fakes, selling bachelor’s, master’s, doctorates, law, and medical degrees to anyone willing to pay the price. No nation is immune from the problem.

• One international diploma mill, with offices in Europe and the Middle East and mailing addresses in the United Kingdom, run by Americans, has sold more than 450,000 degrees—bachelor’s, master’s, doctorates, medicine, and law—to clients worldwide, who did nothing more than write a check. Their revenues exceeded US $450,000,000.

• The number of earned PhD degrees in the United States is 40,000 to 45,000 each year. The number of fake PhDs bought each year from diploma mills exceeds 50,000. In other words, more than half of all people claiming a new PhD have a fake degree.

• Fake medical degrees are an urgent problem. It is easy to buy a medical degree from a fake school, or a counterfeit diploma in the name of a real school. Twenty-five years ago, a Congressional committee calculated that there were over 5,000 fake doctors in the United States, and there are many more now. People have died because of these fakes.

• The Government Accountability Office looked for fake degrees among employees of less than 5 percent of federal agencies and found enough to suggest that more than one hundred thousand federal employees have at least one, many of them paid for by taxpayers not to mention resulting higher pay and increased retirement benefits.