For those who need reminding, this is how it typically goes.

The city’s top policeman [Diploma mill stories are almost always about police forces, fire departments, and the armed services. More often than you’d think, they’re also about schools – public schools. Any organization that forks over cash to people who show it a piece of paper that looks more or less like a college degree is asking for diploma milling. Unless these organizations learn how to screen bogus degrees, they should stop with the whole college degree incentive pay deal.] will face a Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission panel next month, stemming from a bogus college-degree scandal.

Fruitland Park [Florida] Police Chief Mark Isom had received about $775 in incentive pay for what was supposed to be his attendance at an accredited college, which turned out to be a degree mill.

… A criminal investigation dove into the college education of Isom earlier this year after the city of Fruitland Park learned [that the school listed was] a non-accredited and bogus institution, Youngsfield University, which is registered as a corporation in Delaware.

Isom had contended he took the courses from 2003 to 2009. A state statue allowed the city to pay Isom an extra $36 each pay period as an incentive for his having accredited college degrees.

But Isom reportedly paid a one-time electronic payment of $1,110 to the school on March 17, 2009 for online bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminology, diplomas that were then mailed to him, according to the FDLE. [People often ask UD — well, Mr UD once asked UD — why people continue to pay so much money to these places when they could probably, with sufficient technological skill, produce these pieces of paper for themselves, for free. It’s a good question. The idiots on the other end of this, after all, never notice the thing is bogus; or they do notice, but they don’t care. It almost always takes outsiders to blow the whistle in these cases, as in Isom’s bitter complaint that some “disgruntled citizen” fingered him… So why buy the thing? Why part with a thousand bucks? Because most of the diploma mills, for that money, hire some person to sit at a phone and answer it in the unlikely event anyone actually calls to verify credentials. “Good afternoon, Youngsfield University, registrar’s office!… Hm, just a moment… Yes, Mr. Isom was a student here… Would you like me to mail you his transcripts?”]

An FDLE investigation report that was turned over to the State Attorney Office for review stated the college was as a bogus institution and degree mill. And investigators said Isom couldn’t provide the name of a “single” textbook, reference book, instructor or course after allegedly completing 63 separate and distinct bachelors and masters level courses from the school in the six years. [As with the just-tenured professor of justice studies at Northeastern Illinois University who one-clicked his PhD, diploma mill grads won’t show you their thesis or their transcripts, and they can’t remember what they read or who they worked with.]

The report added that Isom had refused to meet with investigators…

The real question is: Given how similar all diploma mill stories are, and how obvious the institutional structure sustaining the mills, why are diploma mills still a billion dollar or so industry?

And the answer is: No one gives a shit.