US versus European diploma mills

After casually "studying" this subject for a couple of years, my sense is that the number of US diploma mills truly pales in comparison to the number found in Europe. Am I right? If so, it surprises me a bit, since Europe is anecdotally known for lots of government regulation. Also, this must pose a logistical challenge for evaluators of European degrees in North America and other continents.

 

but what is "where"

Ah, so how do you define their location? The University Degree Program tends to award U.K. addresses to its fantasy schools. But there's no "there" there. UDP is/was American run, but said to be working out of Jerusalem and Bucharest.

And then there's the familiar ploy of claiming the headquarters is behind the Pizza Hut dumpster in order to attach a certain continental flavor (aroma?) to the operation.

 

I do feel it's the other way around. our departmental internal list of schools, whose degrees are "evaluated especially carefully" shows more than 600 entries for us-based operations vs. 60 europeans ( udp operations coun't only for one). Though not every school on the list is a diploma mill, it goes along well with my own impression. Persoanlly, I can't even think of a single active mill in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal or Italy right now...?!? ( Whereas I do can think of questionable schools in Western Russia, the UK, Switzerland etc., which is also where most european entries on our list come from)

 

Diploma mills seem to pretend residence all over the world. Their pretend residence frequently is in a different jurisdiction from the con-artist running the show though. They seem to like to set up their pretend residence in countries that have an overall good reputation for academic studies, thereby improving their business. This seems to mean higher concentrations in the USA and the UK. An additional contributing factor to these two locales, I'd guess, is the strange law in the UK that makes operating degree mills legal as long as they don't scam UK locals and the splintered enforcement in the USA due to each state having it's own laws coupled with the confusing accreditation system.

 

That's hard to say. I've never seen a credible and exhaustive list of world-wide diploma mills, so it's hard to generate statistics about them.

Besides, how are we defining "diploma mill"? California has more than a hundred state approved degree granting schools that aren't accredited by a recognied accreditor.

If we define "mill" as 'completely bogus' or 'academic fraud', then these CA-approved schools probably aren't mills. But if we define "mill" as 'substandard' or 'flaky', many of them might well be.

At one time, Hawaii had to be the unchallenged degree-mill capital of the world, boasting hundreds of "universities" that consisted of nothing but a website, usually run by somebody who lived many thousands of miles away.

But that state woke up, passed some weak legislation, but assigned the enforcement portfolio to a bulldog of a man who seems to live for litigation. The degree mills scattered like cockroaches.

I think that there's a lesson for other states in Hawaii's experience. You don't need draconian laws, but you do need to have a determined no-nonsense enforcement mechanism that isn't afraid of court. (Oregon got that backwards.)

South Dakota was fleetingly a new host, but it quickly shined the light of legislation on them, and the mills scattered again. Right now Wyoming seems to host bunch of questionable wonders (and seems uninterested in doing anything about it), and you see them operating out of Mississippi and Alabama.

(But is a school really a Wyoming school if it really operates from thousands of miles away (California? Pakistan?) and only maintains a token office in WY to qualify for that state's license?)

Europeans look to me to be strangely clueless about degree-mills.

Private universities seem to be a strange new innovation in much of Europe. Europeans have little experience with them and their systems seem unequipped to handle them.

My impression is that unless a school is government run, there may be little of the external quality assurance that Americans associate with the word "accreditation". In other words, in some European minds "private" seems to be kind of synonymous with "non-accredited".

We see that clearly and brazenly with Knightsbridge, and in the most murky and (intentionally) confusing manner possible with Sorbon.

Problems are only multiplied where there are language differences, and mills are increasingly exploiting that confusion. We are seeing more and more scans of incomprehensible foreign language documents that supposedly verify a mystery school's "RA-equivalence", but nobody...ever... translates the documents, explains their significance in the system that (maybe) generated them, or clarifies how an Anglophone can get credible verification of all this stuff from unimpeachable sources. All we ever get are the school's own website and newsgroup posts combining tremendous attitude with broken English.

But probably the biggest problem in Europe right now is recent higher education "reform" legislation. Combined with weak enforcement, this has suddenly turned the United Kingdom into one of the world's foremost hot-spots for degree mills.

As part of making themselves fit for the European Union or something, Britain passed "reforms" exempting branches of foreign schools operating in the UK from British oversight. Foreign schools can operate remote sites in the UK essentially unregulated, theoretically subject to their home country's oversight.

Unfortunately, the British authorities have interpreted 'branch of a foreign school' to include institutions with primary British addresses, but which claim their degree-granting authority based on an off-shore business licence. The British government just shrugs its shoulders and says 'We don't care, they aren't British awards'.

But that's a nicety that's surely lost on all the foreign students who see the British-sounding name, the British mailing address, the British names on the faculty list, the photos of 'olde-English' architecture and robed academic processions, and enough 'British tradition' to choke a mule. (Just think: Warnborough College, Oxford.