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Monday, August 06, 2007

The Seven Sorry Sisters
and Their Porn



From an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by Alan Contreras, by far the strongest voice in the country on diploma mills:


'Many states don't require that colleges earn accreditation. In California, for instance, you do not even need to have attended an accredited institution to be licensed as a lawyer or psychologist. As of 2006, California had 179 unaccredited secular institutions that granted degrees; the estimated 250 religious colleges in the state are on top of that. Florida, as another example, had 35 unaccredited, secular degree-granting institutions in 2007.

The worst are the so-called Seven Sorry Sisters, the states with such awful oversight of college quality that they are considered havens for diploma mills. The actual number in the group varies, depending on which states have the worst standards or oversight at a given time; the current Sisters are Alabama, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, New Mexico, and either Missouri or Wyoming, depending on which way the political winds blow at the moment. Indeed, in several of those states, operators of substandard colleges are major political players whose goal is to make sure that the states never have genuine, enforceable standards.


... Americans sometimes speak of the market as though we were speaking of the Bible, or perhaps the New York Yankees — something that, although imperfect, is by its nature an object of veneration. In fact, the presence of a thriving industry that sells fake and substandard college degrees to thousands of Americans every year points out the problem: Just because something can be sold to many willing buyers does not make it a good thing. Diploma-mill degrees are the pornography of higher education, and like pornography will always have a market...'