John Bear seeks advice on military credentials, for ABC

Okay, did everyone else read this as a phrase, too, or have I been reading The Onion too much?


Cheers,

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Tom Head
www.tomhead.net

co-author, Bears' Guide to the Best Education Degrees by Distance Learning (Ten Speed Press)
co-author, Get Your IT Degree and Get Ahead (Osborne/McGraw-Hill)

 

It is very easy to do, i have two myself. First is from army active duty, the second is from the army reserves. Each time you switch components (active to reserves to national guard) you are discharged from one and enrolled in the next. Also if you swtich branches (Army to Navy) you will recieve a discharge from the first.

Another common occurance is to leave active duty, and then reenter, and then leave again gives a total of two discharges. The same going from enlisted to commissioned rank or warrant officer.

when I was in the reserves I knew a guy that had started in the national guard, been called up for service in Vietnam, went active, recieved a field promotion to 2d lieutenant, went off active duty to the reserves, had his commision changes (at his request to warrant officer, and then switched back to the national guard (at which point I lost track of him). A total of 5 Honorable Discharges.




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M. C. (Mike) Albrecht, PE

 

As mentioned previously, most (if not all) officers are commissioned through ROTC or the academies, in RA programs, so the likelihood of finding a smoking gun is probably pretty small. If an officer does hold a fake degree, it probably had no baring in his or her commissioning. If, on the other hand, it can be shown that the officer somehow deceived his or her respective service by claiming that their fake degree is real, than you may have a case for fraud. But, since commissioned officers usually come out of programs specifically designed for commissioning them, I don't see how this could happen.

Consider too, the fact that free educational counseling is available to all active duty service members. The counseling comes from professionals, who know about accreditation, at base education centers around the world. The military will pay tuition assistance only for RA or nationally-accredited programs, and counselors would certainly dissuade any service member from enrolling in an unaccredited program, and they definitely could not submit the paperwork to start tuition assistance for such a program. Additionally, I can't think of any service-related school (National Defense University, Army War College, Joint Military Intelligence College, Defense Language Institute, Community College of the Air Force, etc.), that isn't RA.

So, taken together, these observations seem to indicate that it would be unlikely that many officers hold fake degrees which they used for commissioning. If any of them have been commissioned inappropriately, however, one has to wonder how it could have happened and why--what with all the guidance and money for accredited degrees--they chose unaccredited degrees.

I have been (and still am) an EM--Staff Sergeant, E-6 (Promotable)--in the Army for a while. My 15th anniversary on active duty will be next month. I will tell you this: The services place an extremely high importance on personal responsibility, so if anyone can find any improprieties, the offender should be held accountable, and the precedent for holding military members publicly accountable has been set many times. So, the public vetting of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines is nothing new. Ultimately, the soldier's superiors will decide what to do about it. Often, they will be asked to take into consideration guidance given from higher up the chain-of-command.

As an aside, someone mentioned that exposing incompetent officers who have fake degrees may be a good way of getting rid of them. That may be so, but it has been my experience that one does not need to dig that deep to get rid of officers and noncommissioned officers who have displayed incompetence. There are quality management systems that, despite a few hiccups, work quite well to that end.

Tracy<><

 

I would like to add that this public scrutiny has led to a better, more professional, more accountable, and more reliable force over the years. Far from killing the services, it has made us stronger.

How much stronger we could possibly become by looking closely at degrees remains to be seen, but, I suspect, that there are few fake degree holders amongst our brothers and sisters.

Tracy <><

 

Reminds me of the character played by Peter Sellers in Ghost in the Noonday Sun: Dick Scratcher.

 

John Bear,

I don’t know how much usable information you can obtain from this thread (probably not much), but it has been fascinating to read as the topics meander from issue to issue.

 

First off, we're not talking about fraud in the legal sense, and we're also not talking about Bob Jones, California Coast, or any other school that is simply unaccredited. It was made clear before that GMA wants schools that are outright frauds such as Columbia State.

In the last GMA segment, there was no question that the 3 people featured were hired for their jobs because of the phony Columbia State degrees they held. However, I'm not sure that any of them could have been prosecuted criminally, and I don't think they should have been. Did they commit fraud anyway? I think they certainly did. They accepted offers of employement based on fraudulent credentials. I know I'd be mad as hell if my kid was going to Cleary College and had the teacher with the fake degrees.


Bruce

 

But in this case, we are talking about military people right? What does ABC news hope to accomplish through this program? Out someone who has a "fake" degree?

 

Mine:

Inactive Reserve (Awaiting Basic Training assignement)

Active Duty - Discharged to....

Active Reserve (Weekend Warrior)

Inactive Reserve (Awaiting OTS class)

Active Duty - OTS - Graduated and discharged to....

Reserve on Active Duty (commission, 4 year commitment)

Augmented to Regular Air Force and served to....

Retirement and placement in Retired Reserve.

This all resulted in 3 (count 'em, 3) DD Forms 214. Not bad for 18 years.

Rich Douglas, Captain, USAF (Retired)

 

Various people have sent me website URLS where many thousands of resumes of active military officers can be read and searched. Thank you very much to those who helped. A few hours of searching found nothing scandalous. I've passed the information and URLs along to ABC; they are on their own now.

 

Last I checked, an officer's commission requires a 4-year degree, and you gain promotion points for an advanced degree. If someone received their commission or received promotion points as the result of having a fake degree, I'd say that's a pretty big deal. If I was in the military, I'd also be pretty pissed if the fake degree holder was promoted ahead of me.


Bruce

 

As noted by a previous poster, the Army still commissions people without a bachelor's degree.

Officers do not receive "points" for higher education. We are not promoted on a point system. Rather, each officer's record is screened by a promotion board. This board of senior officers grades each record as it compares to the others. The requisite number of officers are promoted. The rest are passed over and see their careers come to an end. (Unlike civilians who, when they are passed by for a promotion, continue in their present careers, we lose ours.)

Rich Douglas

 

Rich Douglas

 

Which is the reason I also "retired" as a Captain (US Army - Corps of Engineers)

Mike Albrecht

 

Were you able to retire? I had 16 years of active duty, so I retired under the Voluntary Early Retirement Program. Same benefits, but your retirement pay is pro-rated. And it was hardly "voluntary."

Rich Douglas

 

I had a choice RIFT out or "retire", I took the retirement option sans any benefits. My last paperwork lists that I "retired from the Army Reserves".

 

Ahhh. See, I'm an actual retiree. When the government was trying to downsize the military, it gave a retirement option to those with more than 15 but less than 20 years. That was me. Everything's the same except a proportionately smaller retirement pay. (In my case, 40% instead of 50%, because I'd done 16 instead of 20 years.) I have the blue ID card, full medical and dental, etc. Now, if they'd only retroactively offer the GI Bill to those of us who were never eligible....

Rich Douglas

 

My dad retired as an O-9 after 36 years. Normally, one can’t serve beyond 35 years. However, at his rank, he was not authorized to retire without Congressional approval (thus, he was in a catch 22). By the time he got Congressional approval to retire, he had put in 36 years!

 

I just realized that many of our newer members may have missed the GMA segments. I only saved the bookmark for the second episode, so here it is. Draw your own conclusions.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAmerica/GMA010516Diploma_mills2.html


Bruce

 

Et Tu, Brute?