Phantom Ph.Ds a growth industry

When Gary Santry claimed no fewer than four degrees from two leading American universities, he was safe in guessing his prospective employers at UCD would never check his credentials.

The Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business has been embarrassed since it was revealed last weekend that its programme director of the international executive MBA degree never earned the MBA he claimed from Notre Dame or the MA and Ph.D his CV said he had received from Southern Methodist University.

But CV fraud is an increasing worry for employers, and many senior human resources managers admit they can afford neither the time nor the resources to check every last detail on each applicant's CV. When it comes to falsifying academic records, applicants invent new qualifications, claim degrees they failed or never completed, or upgrade the qualifications they received.

The FBI estimates that 500,000 people in the US claim degrees they do not have, while a Congressional study estimates one-third of all job applicants fake their resumΘs. The National Employment Screening Service determined that half of all resumΘs have at least one deliberate error. A recent corporate investigation in New York found a quarter of the 1,000 CVs reviewed contained falsehoods, and in many of the most serious incidents the false claims were supported by fake documentation obtained on the Internet.

According to a report from the International Chamber of Commerce, up to half of British HR managers view false claims on CVs as a serious problem. The report found lying about qualifications accounts for 21 per cent of CV untruths, "second only to lies about previous experience".

If HR departments had the resources and time, it would be easy to find whether applicants have the degrees they claim from real universities. It is more difficult to root out those with real degrees from fake universities and diploma mills, many with names that are hard to distinguish from authentic foundations - names such as Columbia State University, Columbia Pacific University and Trinity College and University.

Columbia State University was run from a small office suite in Louisiana, and advertised in the Economist and other respectable publications, offering a Ph.D in 27 days until it was forced to close.

Columbia Pacific University operated in California despite state refusal of approval in 1996 and repeated court and state orders to close from 1997 and a court ruling that it had committed deceptive business practices. The school's best-known alumnus is John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, who received his Ph.D in psychology from Columbia Pacific University and was named the Distinguished CPU Alumnus of 1998. The same school once famously awarded a student a master's degree in line-dancing and for watching country and western dancing.

Early last year, CPU was ordered to close permanently and to refund all students who enrolled since June 1997. But it set itself up soon again, first as Columbia Pacific University Montana and then as Columbia Commonwealth University, claiming accreditation in Malawi. A website operated by CPU "alumni" is now devoted to defending the validity of their degrees, their reputation, and their long-lost investment in "education".

Some degree mills are operating openly in Ireland or with Irish names, including Glencullen University and Shelbourne University. Shelbourne University claims: "We are a traditional Irish university, offering undergraduate degrees, masters courses and research programmes."

Glencullen offers degrees in more spheres than any self-respecting Irish university, including aerospace engineering and cardiopulmonary sciences. If that isn't enough to give you a heart attack before you get the courage to fly again, consider how both Shelbourne and Glencullen are run by a network that may now be the largest diploma mill in the world.

The latest addition to the list of diploma mills with Irish-sounding names is the University of Wexford, with a "Vice-Chancellor" calling himself "Professor Oliver Hill", but no faculty listing. The "university" has a contact address in Zurich, and its domain name www.universityofwexford.org was registered earlier this year to Anca Dionisie in Bucharest, Romania.

The names can be impressive, and so too are the initials, because many CVs give only school initials. Everyone knows TCD and NUI. But what about TCU for Trinity College and University, or ULCA? ULCA sounds like UCLA in California but was, in fact, the Universal Life Church of Alabama. ULCA changed its name to Byron University and for some time its website was offering degrees to print freely, with a logo similar to the coat-of-arms of the University of Limerick.

US websites offer authentic-looking "novelty" or bogus Ph.Ds from as little as $39.95, while fake degree certificates from British universities can be bought for as little as £30. The Internet, modern computers, scanners and colour printers have made it easy to produce counterfeit documents, including fake degrees from real universities and real degrees from fake universities.

If your ego needs massaging, why not go for a doctorate from ULC in California. It sounds impressive, but $25 gets you an honorary doctorate (DD) from the Universal Life Church in California, which is totally legal but academically useless.

In the meantime, untruthful applicants will continue to deprive employers of the skills they seek and deprive honest applicants of a fair chance to compete at interviews. And the International Chamber of Commerce report warns: "Failing to check that the academic claims of an applicant are genuine may ultimately leave a company or organisation open to allegations of negligence, and potentially to lawsuits."

pcomerford@irish-times.ie