But Do They Have a Legitimate Ph.D.?
The selling and buying of degrees
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At the bottom of my Google search for “buying phds” there was an ad.
No one is going to pay for ad placement unless they think they can make some money from the ad. Supply and demand. People want to buy doctorates, places give them a spot to do it. Let’s see what we see when I click on that ad.
A seemingly endless list of the “universities” that sell Ph.D.s. Amazing. Why do the work when you can buy the degree? Does this sound familiar? Sound anything at all like what we see on this platform? People wanting money for poorly written work, AI-generated stories, or flat-out plagiarism?
Read what the Times of India published about the subject here on January 28, 2020.
The first one offers package deals so you can get not only your degree but your transcripts to back up your degree. Who doesn’t like a bargain I ask you. The middle one is a template. Literally fill in the blanks and the site generates your degree for you. You simply print it out.
Here’s an article by Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal from 2006, Credentialism and the Proliferation of Fake Degrees: the Employer Pretends to Need a Degree; the Employee Pretends to Have One.
So clearly degree buying is a thing and an issue.
Manav Bharti University (MBU) in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh has allegedly sold as many as 36,000 degrees since it was founded in 2009, for prices ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 rupees (US$1,362–4,085), an Indian government agency investigation found last month. Of the 41,000 degrees issued by the university in that time, only 5,000 were found to be genuine. — This Week in Asia
And then from the Straits Times
BANGALORE — An Indian private university has been accused of selling tens of thousands of degrees for money over a decade, in the latest illustration of corruption in the country’s higher education system.
From al-bab.com
India’s fake degree scandals hit expats in Kuwait
On Saturday police in the Indian city of Mysore raided a ceremony where more than 100 people dressed in gowns and mortarboards were about to receive fake degrees.
The would-be graduates had paid up to 100,000 rupees ($1,357) for doctorates from the bogus International Global Peace University, according to the police. Three people were arrested.
The raid (video here) came little more than a month after Indian police began investigating another institution — the so-called Ballsbridge University — following a tip-off from authorities in the Caribbean island of Dominica.
From EBI
Fake University Degrees Rampant in India
Fake degrees are rattling the foundation of Mumbai University, one of the oldest universities in India. Earlier this year a vendor was literally stationed outside of the campus supplying people with fake degrees. While shocking, that vendor was not the only one supplying the bogus certificates. Over the last three and a half school years, more than 900 fake MU degrees have been discovered through pre-employment verifications.
The most popular fake degree choices are Bachelor of Commerce, Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Sciences and Masters of Management Studies. Every time the university discovers someone passing off a counterfeit degree they notify the police, but the university told local newspapers that there is no way to tell how many of these phony diplomas are never discovered because most companies don’t include education verification in their screening process. Each year they only get 3,500 to 4,000 verification requests, an extremely low number considering the hundreds of thousands of degrees they have conferred.
MU is not the only institution dealing with this problem. A report from New Delhi TV found 1 in every 3 lawyers in India is a fake. They describe a full third of the nations’ attorneys as possessing “fraudulent” law degrees or as being “non-practicing persons” who are degrading the profession.
Did you catch that last part?
1 in every 3 lawyers in India is a fake.
This is a global phenomenon. And I have often wondered,
Why is there such a proliferation of PhDs on Medium?
If you spent that many years studying, writing, and being published why would you spend any time, at all, on this platform? Is that a waste of your time and talents?
I could see if you were retired and liked to write and be published and did so in the subject matter that you’re an expert in, otherwise, what’s the point?
If your Ph.D. has nothing to do with what you’re writing and publishing about on this platform, then why is it on your bio or following a comma after your name?
