A recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education discusses some of the strategies being put in place to combat diploma mills. CHEA, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation in the U.S. and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization have joined forces to fight diploma mills.
The article highlights the difficulty of international institutional recognition. One of the strategies recommended by the task force is to ensure that international schools are accredited (a word that has such varied meanings as to be almost pointless without definition in hand by the person using it) in the home country, and the article points out the very real difficulty in determine which bodies are authorized to accredit in a particular country. Not all countries have accrediting boards, and many countries have numerous educational authorities that grant different levels of national recognition to legitimate schools. Of course, this challenge completely ignores the bogus accrediting organizations that are often created by the same entities who are creating diploma mill websites.
The CHEA/UN statement also discusses creating a degree-mill alert network. While this sounds great in theory, there’s apparently no information about who’d run it (and “own” the data), who’d pay for it, how it’d be organized, and what determinants would be used to identify institutions. I mean, there’s a huge difference between a hospitality institute that’s approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a teaching college recognized by the Ministry of Education, a music academy that’s part of a professional consortium, a medical college approved by the Ministry of Health, a private school authorized to run as a business, a vocational/technical training academy that also offers diplomas, and a university that exists only on the web. Which of them would your institute accept as “accredited”? Why is it important to discuss this when talking about diploma mills, some of which do actually have brick-and-mortar presences with actual students who think they’re getting something for their dollars.
Heck, even in the U.S., there’s no single authority or governing body that “accredits” schools. There’s voluntary regional accreditation, CHEA-authorization, the Department of Education’s accreditation lists, business college accreditation, medical and law school accreditation, bible college accreditation, the list goes on and on. Add in 170+ countries, and it’s no wonder this topic comes up at basically every conference
Back to diploma mills, though. The Chronicle article ends with a reference to the Oregon Office for Degree Authorization, one of my own personal favorite sites for looking up known diploma mills. It’s even on the “Links” page. Diploma Mills News on blogspot is another favorite as is the list maintained by the state of Michigan, both of which are updated regularly. These, and more, are all included in the Diploma Mills section of “Researching International Education Systems and Institutions.”
http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=6697&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
http://www.osac.state.or.us/oda/unaccredited.aspx
http://diplomamillnews.blogspot.com/
http://www.michigan.gov/documents/Non-accreditedSchools_78090_7.pdf
