The Changing Face of Values: Fake Degrees - II
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg , CA
“You thought it to be a light matter, while it was most serious in the sight of Allah” 24:15
I am also reminded of my school-mates at Muslim High School in Rawalpindi in the 50’s. The teachers then were poor, honest but cruel. They unloaded their frustrations on the students and would beat them like you would not beat a mad dog. I escaped the onslaught inflicted on a majority of the students because I was thought of as comparatively a good student. But I saw the butchery taking place every day on those frozen, dew-decked grassy lawns in winter where we were made to sit in the open, so that the headmaster could cast a glance at the teacher that he was hard-working and studious, by conducting a zero-period class.
Why undergo all this when education could become so handy as it seems to have become! The epidemic of fake degrees became more widespread after the mid-80s. So we were a different brand of people, raised in different circumstances.
According to a UNESCO report, “Bribery and corruption damage universities and schools across the world… education is plagued by rigged tendering processes, academic fraud and bribes over place and posts… academic fraud as fake degrees, is more common in the United States than in the developing countries”.
The report says the number of fake universities on the Internet offering bogus degrees rose from 200 to 800 between 2000 and 2004. Basically, the world education and its credibility are at stake. Authors like Jacques Hallak and Muriel Poisson paint a rather very bleak picture. Their report says:
“In most societies-rich and poor-the education sector is facing severe difficulties and crisis”
Personally, I am in the knowledge of some of my colleagues who were not very bright students. They managed to get employment in the Emirates, and then all of a sudden I heard them prefixing their names with the abbreviation of Dr. and suffixing it with a PhD. On inquiry they, in the 70’s, told me that they ‘earned’ it through correspondence from the United States of America. I was greatly impressed on their ‘self-improvement” venture. Later I discovered the real truth. To apply for a Grade-19 post, a Doctorate degree was a prerequisite. They got both easily while we waited for years.
According to a BBC investigation team, “Nearly 150 Britons are among thousands of people to have bought academic qualification from a network of fake online universities in America”. Fraudsters based in Spokane, Washington State, sold over $6million of bogus qualification to nearly 10,000 people around the world, including medical degrees and qualifications in nuclear engineering”. The founders of St Regis University were recently sentenced to three years in prison for the fraud. You do not have to do any coursework. You just submit whatever you did in life. So basically, it is like translating your past experience into a degree, depending on the fatness of your pocket. After the United States of America, England is the second country in the list of issuing bogus degrees.
Pakistan these days is ringing with the news of fake degrees, and the plum jobs and assignments people with fake degrees have acquired. But wait! The problems is present everywhere. Fourteen Kenyans are among 10,000 people being investigated by security agencies in the US for buying fake degree certificates with which they have acquired key jobs, including in the military . They call it most shocking, but I take it as normal news when we are told of the other scandalous intellectual frauds.
Recently, some 70 Saudis were reported to have purchased or attempted to purchase fake university diplomas in the United States. But this alerted the Saudis and a thorough investigation is now being made. The Saudi Monarch has taken the wisest step by sending some 200,000 Saudis overseas for higher education, more than ever sent in the last 20 years, as reported in the Economist of July 17, 2010. Why would this desert kingdom, with a population of just 30m, and having an economy of $420 billion and with that many highly educated people not change its face? This would revolutionize the Kingdom in a few years.
The axe has now begun falling on bogus doctorates. Eventually, all will be unearthed. The question is why people like Mr. Baber Awan, a law minister of Pakistan, or a TV chirping bird like Dr. Amar and many more in the Parliament or outside, felt constrained to deck their names with a doctorate degree? Psychologists and medical experts look at this urge as a mental condition, born out of sheer frustration. The example given is that of Sri Lanka where only 4% of the students sitting for the Advanced Level (AL) enter universities. The rest stay deprived and look for other means to get a diploma. Not so in Pakistan. The leftouts and those who had been least interested in academics, eventually went into politics. The result is obvious.
Some who bought degrees, they did it to just impress their friends, family or boss; some did it to earn more money. The fact of the matter is that the whole exercise in the end becomes highly dangerous, leading to some tragic consequences. The unfortunate part is that the United States should have become the world capital of fake colleges and diplomas, and England becoming as number two. A co-authored report by Ben Cohen says, “We have so far identified 1,762 fake institutions, and we are still investigating a further 1,545 currently filed as suspicious before publishing them on the “Accredit-base” database. In the United States alone there are about 810 diploma mills already identified and many more still are under investigation as per this Report. More than 35% of the diploma mills operate in California, Hawai, Washington and Florida. The world’s second biggest concentration of fake colleges is in the UK, having about 271 fake Institutions, making the UK the center of Europe’s bogus colleges scam.
The business of selling fake degrees booms because there is a great consumption of it, a great need of it. Duping others and getting duped, however, is not a big deal these days. These fake diploma mills capitalize on people’s lust for money and status. Good education, like any other business, is expensive. I know it personally. My middle son, an electrical engineer, went to Berkeley Haas School for his MBA. He had to leave his six-figure job, and spend over hundred thousand dollars and stay away from his family for more than two years and had to travel extensively. Another son who finally earned his MD degree, have had to incur a debt of close to 200,000 dollars; and spend years in training till he aged close to 40’s. Why didn’t it occur to them to buy one of their liking from one of these mills? It all depends on how children get raised.
My father once thrashed me in a manner that the act would easily be construed as “child-abuse”, for just taking out one rupee from his wallet without his permission. Years later when I became a lecturer, and every night after listening to news on the BBC, he would come and sit with me with his “Hooka” to watch the 9 O’clock news on the TV in Pakistan, I once ventured to bring up the incident again. “Why did you thrash me so harshly when I was just a fifth grade student?” He listened to me patiently and replied with a good puff of Hooka. “Ashraf, I did not beat you. I beat the thief in you?” I am proud that he did that. Now we discover a majority of the members of parliament, in some cases both father and son, having bought the fake degrees. That thrashing of his put me on the right track. I had stolen the “money”, to pay for the loss in gambling to which I was prone in those days, eventually leading me to earn a perfect 200/200 in Mathematics in my Matriculation examination in 1958.
The issue of bogus degrees with the parliamentarians is symptomatic, and is reflective of a very serious, moral decline, prevalent in all walks of life in Pakistan. Once a mother asked Woodrow Wilson, who at that time was the president of the famous Princeton University. “What would this university do for her son?” He replied, “ Weguarantee satisfaction, or you get your son back”. Yes, the institutions of reputation guarantee growth. Those who make their way to Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, etc; they rule over the world. They establish their credibility in the world. Education had come to them as gradually and persistently as the moonshine comes, perceptible, not when it was in progress, but in results.
Someone asked Aristotle, “What is the difference between an educated and an uneducated man?” He replied, “The same difference as between being alive and being dead”. Derek Bok, president, Harvard University said it better, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”. These fake degree holders, no matter, how experienced they may be, basically are ignorant; and are fraudulent, untrustworthy and fake people. Yes, Edison, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln and many more did not have much of the formal education, but they never thought of buying it with money. They were men of sterling character. The word, fake, could never enter their minds. Their innovations and experience determined their worth. For our politicians and parliamentarians, the words of heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Louis would make some sense,
“Go to school. I tell you to go to school. I’m well known and I made a lot of money and I lost a lot of money. I’d be better off if I had gone to school longer, and so will you”.
