How can consumers and personnel departments spot fake degrees?
Some of the bad guys go to the same diploma printing companies that real schools use. They also use the same T-shirt and mug companies that the real schools use. A school can have safety features like holograms or safety paper, but you can then go out on the Internet and buy fake transcripts on safety paper and buy diplomas with holograms. Whatever a real college has, the bad guys have. The U.S. Department of Education was tasked a year ago to make a Web-based master list of all accredited schools, and that’s a start. Right now, the best thing to do is to Google the school you are looking at and then ask a real college if it will accept transfer credits from that institution. This story appears in the January 17, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
