'Get a degree and make all your problems disappear.'
So today's subject line says. This year, for reasons that escape me, I've been deluged with spam mail-order miracle degree pitches that hiss for attention and keep coming. I feel like telling the spammers I'm as likely to cough up the US$50 or whatever as I am to sign up for one of those 'h0me l0ans'. Of course, I'd actually be mad to say anything at all because that would only prove my e-mail address is live and make me more of a target.
Presumably, however, loads of gullible folk around the globe are replying and buying the dubious degrees or nobody would bother to peddle them. The trade brings to mind the antics of those ancient snake-oil salesmen, the 'pardoners' who pranced around selling religious forgiveness to anyone desperate enough to invest in spiritual capital - and there were plenty of takers.
In the information age, for the ambitious job seeker, ignorance - or rather a lack of accredited intelligence - is a sin. How tempting it must be to try to absolve it by reaching for the plastic. In their convenience, the sham degrees seem to mock the idea of online distance learning and of trying in general. 'Stuff that,' their advertising seems to hiss. 'Save yourself years of hassle with our quick-fix diploma. Go on: you know how killing study can be.'
The purveyors of this no-pain-dubious-gain garbage aren't exactly in the phone book. A typical case study is the now defunct 'Saint Regis University', purported to be based in Liberia. The rogue operation granted degrees to those prepared to do little more than describe their life experiences and pay a fee until, at the close of last year, prosecutors proved the university formed part of an elaborate online scam run by a former estate agent quaintly named Dixie Ellen Randock. Her husband, Steven Karl Randock Snr, and six alleged accomplices wound up in court in the wake of a United States Secret Service sting. The group was apparently one of the main players in the flourishing fake-degree and diploma-granting swindle, reportedly worth US$1 billion a year. That's some racket.
You have to wonder, however, how much clout any fake degree can pack. It seems doubtful any employer would be so stupid as to be fooled by degrees from St Regis, St Trinians or wherever. If employers have doubts, all they have to do is Google. Then they will soon discover that, behind the qualification, there's no trace of anything as palpable as a campus. Even if a fake degree holder lands a job via the qualification, trouble may still lie ahead if it requires more than 'attitude' and involves the application of those technical niceties known as 'skills'.
