Hilal Nakiboglu: The quickest way to get a degree

Wish your transcript looked better? Want a college diploma already? Would you like to have your very own Harvard Law degree before Memorial Day? Well, if you've got a few hundred dollars to burn, you could have it all.

Thanks to the rapid proliferation of entrepreneurial Web sites, phony document trafficking is reaching an eyebrow-raising high. Accordingly, the number of people trying to use falsified documents to secure jobs and entry into graduate school is up as well.

Research conducted by Scrip-Safe, a company that manufactures college transcript paper, estimates that at least half a million people lie to their employers each year about having graduated from college.

Although forgery of academic documents in particular is by no means new, the Internet appears to have made the process faster and considerably easier as well.

The site www.backalleypress.com, for instance, offers customers "1,000 replica novelty degrees, diplomas and transcripts from universities all around the world." With its main office located in China, the company allows you to pick your own GPA and fill in your desired major. If you transfer $630 to a bank account they've set up in Estonia, for instance, you can expect a doctoral degree complete with a "customized set of transcripts" in just 10 days.

Some companies even go further than this. BoxFreeConcepts.com, for instance, encourages customers to "add honors for that special touch! Date your diploma for whenever seems right!" Reassuring us that all diplomas come complete with "snazzy text, lifelike forged signatures and graphics so convincing everyone swears they're real!" BoxFreeConcepts also provides shoppers the option to create a glowing recommendation letter and even their very "own university."

Colleges are, understandably, up in arms about this. Last August, several senior administrators at institutions across the nation sent e-mails to fakedegrees.com requesting that company, according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, "cease and desist" from using their institutions' "names and logos." Fakedegrees.com has not removed references to these colleges from its Web site and continues to offer falsified diplomas and transcripts to the paying customer.

Frustrated, some higher education lobbying groups have asked for the government to crack down on these companies. Although legislation in Illinois and North Dakota is being proposed that would make the use of such documents a misdemeanor punishable by law, other states have been slow to follow suit.

Lying to advance your career and "further" your education is, sadly, not limited to the under-30-and-doesn't-know-better crowd. The president of Quincy University, for instance, resigned last October after certain "inaccuracies" were uncovered on his resume. Rev. Eugene Kole had indicated earning two graduate degrees when he actually had not.

Last week, I was deeply disappointed to learn Quincy Troupe also lied on his C.V. Troupe, esteemed poet and author of, among other things, Snake-Back Solos, pretended for 26 years that he was an alum of Grambling College. This winner of one Peabody and two American Book Awards was a professor at the University of California at San Diego. Apparently, Troupe never finished a semester at Grambling and does not hold a bachelor's degree.

What is especially surprising here is that background checks were not conducted for these "scholars." Why? In this day of computerized registrar databases, accessing this sort of information should be easy. It is ridiculous for any hiring agent to not pick up the phone and call an institution to verify a degree.

It seems to me that simply sending e-mails to companies like fakedegrees.com isn't the answer here. Looking to curb document fraud, colleges would be well-advised to tighten up their own internal processes instead. There can be no excuse for people like Kole and Troupe to exist and publicly thrive in the (higher education) system by relying on false documentation.

While visiting the backalleypress.com site last weekend, I considered ordering a Yale diploma for my cousin's new pet turtle "Jimmy Dean." It certainly would look nice on the wall behind Jimmy's aquarium. Browsing through the site, I noticed the clear disclaimer that the company is "in no way affiliated with any school or government agency" and consequently, can't "put you or your attendance on any school records."

Catching a person who tries to use a fake diploma should be simple. It's up to admissions and human resource officers to do their part in keeping out the dishonest. The technology exists to help officials detect morally decrepit applicants. If Jimmy Dean gets an acceptance letter to medical school, then wouldn't blaming backalleypress.com just be an easy, finger-pointing cop out?

My sense is, absolutely.

Hilal Nakiboglu is a second-year doctoral student in Higher Education Management from Ankara, Turkey.

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