The deputy chief operating officer of the Baltimore City schools (salary $135,200) explains that since the advertisement for his job didn’t say his university degrees had to be from accredited schools, his BA and MBA diploma mill degrees were just fine.

The school system agreed; but then the Baltimore Sun went sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, and suddenly DCO Kevin Seawright has moved his ass clear out of the office. He’s taking his skills to private industry.

Remember. Public schools, fire departments, the military: None of these places gives a shit about diploma mill degrees. They don’t even know what they are. All of these organizations boast Kevin Seawrights.

… and his Mississippi PhD.

Nicki Harrington, who will step down in June as chancellor of the Yuba Community College District [in California], named Al Alt interim chancellor until her successor’s term begins…

Greg Kemble, secretary for the academic senate, said Alt’s doctorate from a Mississippi-based business described as a diploma mill is part of the reason he questions Alt’s appointment.

“As human resources director, his expertise should be to identify diploma mills — such as the one where he got his Ph.D.,” Kemble said…

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Update: UD thanks Crimson05er for correcting her statement that the Yuba Community College District was also in Mississippi.

… a campus, and the campus looks like a subsidized rental unit, something’s wrong.

A Jacksonville reporter asks:

I wonder if any of the audience at the River Club who heard Lt. Gov.-elect Jennifer Carroll speak about education reform remembers the disclosure a few years back that Carroll had paid good money while in the Navy to get a master’s degree from an unaccredited diploma mill?

Like the one about a benighted congregation that hires as pastor some Elmer Gantry who shows up and looks presentable.

There was Rafer Byrdsong, liar, bigamist, what have you.

Now there’s Rev. Drumheller, fraudster, child murderer, all-’round degenerate.

Both men boast diploma mill degrees. No one ever checks.

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UD thanks her sister for the link to the Drumheller story.

They went into it together, like the buddies they are, all of them getting their pretend degrees so that they could get raises.

Then the shit hit the fan.

And now they’re suing together for “extreme emotional distress.”

Good luck, lads.

Yes, yes, the woman in charge of spending EU money on Bulgarian farms claimed a university degree she didn’t have. The Agriculture Minister rails against her lying ways…

Yet, you know… You’re supposed to check credentials.

… er… awkward position on the issue of higher education.

UD‘s always hearing about how low standards are in the humanities classroom, because the field is so vague… So it’s refreshing to see truly low standards in math, of all places.

The University of Manitoba just gave some person a math PhD even though said person, claiming a diagnosis of extreme exam anxiety, not only failed his comp exam (twice), but did not complete “the required graduate courses.”

This outcome so pissed off one of the math professors at Manitoba that he went after “a court injunction in September against the awarding of the PhD.”

This outcome so pissed off the university that they have suspended the math professor for the rest of the year, without pay.

Manitoba says it’s upset about his having compromised the student’s privacy. You and I know the school’s upset because the professor made their degradation of their own degree public, and thereby deeply embarrassed the University of Manitoba.

The chair of the Hernando County Planning and Zoning Commission got her Ph.D from a diploma mill.

Hammond defended her academic background and said she has “nothing to hide.”

She said she is in the process of obtaining her transcripts from the Southern Africa Policy Institute in Zimbabwe [UD gets nothing when she Googles this name.].

She also said the Ph.D she received from the now-closed and non-accredited Kennedy Western University (which later changed its name to Warren National University) was legitimate.

She disagreed with published reports that referred to the university as a “diploma mill.”

“If it is a diploma mill, then there are a lot of people in this country who are in a position they shouldn’t be in because they got degrees from Kennedy Western,” Hammond said. [If lots of people bought their degree there, it can’t be a diploma mill.]

Hammond said she has also never referred to herself as a “doctor” in referencing her position. [Why not, if you believe your Ph.D degree is legitimate?]

This concluding paragraph of a Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, authors of a much-discussed new book about American universities, gets at something ol’ UD has pondered many a year.

There’s a significant disconnect, at universities ranging from the most rapaciously crass for-profit to the most hopelessly threadbare non-profit, between what people willingly pay for the education and the degree on offer and what, in many cases, the education and the degree are worth. Let me elaborate.

We’ll start here: By UD‘s reckoning, only diploma mills represent true higher ed efficiency pricing. Why?

Consider diploma mill costs first from the student’s perspective.

On the one hand, she’ll earn her diploma in seconds.

On the other, as countless ruined political and professional lives have made known to her, it’s a risky degree, subject at any moment to exposure.

Yet generations of diploma mill graduates have faked their way through white-collar lives without exposure… Statistically, she’s likely to get away with upping her public school or military salary by purchasing, with the press of a key, a pretend master’s …

What’s she willing to pay?

Well if the thing cost nothing, or cost $21.49 like a Popeil Pocket Fisherman, it would make her nervous. It would seem really obviously cheesy and bogus. In some part of her mind she’s working on believing in the authenticity of the degree in case she’s ever, you know, asked about it… It should cost a plausible amount so she can say, if cornered, I thought it was a legit university! I paid a huge sum!

Hm… hm…

Something in the low thousands? Hell, she might even be able to get her agency to spring for the tuition, or part of it… After all, the only reason she knows about the particular diploma mill she’s considering is that Sid two cubicles over got his promotion by getting the agency to pay for his diploma mill degree. One afternoon, over coffee, he told her about it…

Yes, the low thousands. Real universities charge in the thousands, don’t they? But it’d have to be really low thousands. She’s not made of money.

How about pricing from the perspective of the diploma mill?

Its only costs involve printing, posting, and – if it’s one of the diploma mill Ivies – the hiring of a guy with a cell phone to make up shit if potential employers call for references.

Plenty of people all over the world want its services. Its business is a raging success. It could probably charge two hundred dollars per degree and do nicely.

But it wants to make a huge profit. Who wouldn’t? And it’s peculiarly well-situated to do so. Low to vanishing overhead, a globeful of grasping morons.

And the beauty of it is that the diploma mill has to charge rather a lot in order to make the education look legit.

Plus keep in mind that huge numbers of its customers are rich people from Saudi Arabia and places like that… And tons of American employers subsidize employee education and don’t check out the universities employees say they’re attending…

So the diploma mill goes for a nice even number: One thousand dollars. Or if that sounds too arbitrary, as if the mill hasn’t done the complex math to match the complex intellectual apparatus it represents, make it, uh, $1,210. Something like that.

And indeed something like that — something that makes good sense to customer and provider — is what most diploma mills charge.

Whew. All this math has exhausted UD. She’ll write more later.

… diploma mill problem. (Scroll down.) Seems to keep cropping up.

Latest case: Beat Rohr, high-ranking official in the United Nations Development Program, has a PhD from the way-notorious Pacific Western University.

According to this report, the UN says so what.

These are excerpts from a strong-minded article about universities with virtually non-existent graduation rates.

I’ve covered scads of scandals at two of them: Chicago State and Texas Southern.

… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.

… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.

… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.

… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”

… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.

… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.

And how, pray, will they be shut down? That is precisely the job of the accrediting agencies. In taking away accreditation, they make it impossible for the schools to operate. But they don’t remove accreditation even from Chicago State, which has a 13% graduation rate.

Shut down the accreditors. Start a new agency that’s not just as corrupt as the schools it ignores.

You can’t say Tom Harkin didn’t warn you.

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You know, fraud for fraud, diploma mills are looking a hell of a lot better to UD at this point than the for-profits.

The for-profits are getting all of this attention… And unlike the fly-by-night diploma mills, the for-profits, who have fancy people like ex-Princeton president Harold Shapiro running them, aren’t going away…

What I mean is, if you’re like Massachusetts politician Jeff Perry, and you’ve bought a diploma mill degree, and your congressional campaign’s tanking because people are laughing at you about it, you can say Look, the place was shut down by the authorities. The president’s in jail. I was the innocent victim of a fraud.

It’s much harder to dissociate yourself from the for-profits.

Not only that, but the diploma mill transaction is a straightforward one-shot deal: You pay $1,000, you get a PhD, end of story. No loans, no muss, no fuss.

… these farcically conflicted groups receive money from the entities they’re supposed to oversee.

Which is why accreditors accredit almost everything, corporate boards at places as outrageous as Goldman Sachs do nothing, and auditors rarely meet a Ponzi scheme putrid enough to catch their eye.

Here are excerpts from conversations between US senators and a representative of the accreditors who accredit all those for-profit colleges you’ve been reading about. (Lynn O’Shaughnessy, CBS: “Until the industry is cleaned up — if it ever is — I’d stay away from these schools. You can start by avoiding any school that advertises on television.”)

“Do you think maybe your rigorous standards aren’t rigorous enough?”

“I believe the standards themselves are rigorous…”

I’m sure they are, honey, I’m sure they are. But you are not a standards-writing organization. You are an accrediting organization.

… “If your process doesn’t detect readily apparent fraud, who is protecting students and taxpayers?… We rely on accreditation.”

Mr. McComis replied that it that was up to state and federal regulators, “the other parts of the triad,” to root out fraud.

“Accreditation is designed to evaluate the quality of education, not to detect fraud,” he said, adding, “Certainly, if we find fraud in the process, we’re going to act on it.”

“But your on-site evaluations didn’t detect it,” Senator Harkin said. “It seems like you accept the schools’ word on what they’re doing.”

Quality involves not merely how well taught courses are (and there’s reams of evidence that many courses are taught poorly at these schools); quality involves institutional controls, hiring and recruiting practices, etc. — Things accreditors are supposed to review and approve.

Mr. Harkin said he planned to “look into” the financing structure of the accrediting system, saying it “seems to be a situation that is rife with conflict.”

That plan has implications for nonprofit colleges as well, since all accreditors are financed by the institutions they accredit…

Yes. Which is why vanishingly few schools fail to be accredited. They may get warnings, yadda yadda. But everyone outside of obvious diploma mills (and they’re still fooling lots of people by using their own bogus accrediting jobbies) gets to operate.