Harvard University has degrees for sale and all you need is a cashier’s check and a few hundred dollars. Attendance not necessary.
If you seized an opportunity to buy a degree and have your very own name embossed on an almost real degree, you would not be alone in your deceit. It is estimated that at least half a million people lie about or alter their credentials each year.
People shake all integrity to the wind by lying about attending or graduating from college or falsifying transcripts, according to a survey conducted by Scrip-Safe, a company that manufacturers paper for college transcripts.
Joe Orndorff, president of Scrip-Safe, said it is easy to graduate from the institution of your choosing with so much access to technology.
“You can easily falsify documents by scanning a registrar’s signature and making it look like a transcript,” Orndorff said. “A printer can be used to mimic the lettering of a particular institution.”
Forging academic records is certainly not new, but with the explosion of Web sites selling degrees, transcripts and recommendation letters, the problem is significantly worse.
Despite the increase of academic fraud, The University of Memphis has not experienced many instances.
“We have had one or two instances over the last eight to 10 years,” said Marion Emslie, director of university commencements and executive assistant to vice-president of student affairs. “In those instances, employers called to verify that a student had graduated from The University.”
As a result of the popularity of such Web sites as Cooldegree.com, Fakedegrees.com and BackalleyPress.com, two states, Illinois and North Dakota, have considered legislation that would make it a misdemeanor to obtain false academic credentials to secure a promotion or employment or to gain admission to college.
As many as 600 schools are currently using a server at the University of Texas at Austin to send and receive transcripts electronically.
According to a report released by the Collegiate Registrars and Business Officers, one sure-fire method that registrars and employers can use to protect themselves against receiving phony transcripts is to require the documents to be sent directly from the institution, either electronically or by post.
“A falsified diploma is very easy to identify and can be easily caught,” Emslie said. “We have several back-ups. We have a system called SIS that archives all graduates and this system is linked with the Registrar’s Office.”
Most of the Web sites that offer degrees and other credentials post disclaimers that state their sites are for entertainment purposes only. There are currently no clear statutes for this type of crime and although many phony credentials can be easily verified, the numbers of people using these sites continues to climb.
“For people that take the risk, once you graduate from a state institution,” Emslie said, “the academic record becomes public information and the degree is a legal document.”
