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Avoid College Degree Scams

“Earn a college degree in 28 days!” “Buy your high school diploma now!” “Get this prestigious unaccredited degree!” These are among the few advertisements that regularly cross my e-mail account touting easy ways to earn educational credentials quickly.

Would you trust a degree from Columbia State University? Sounds good, doesn't it? It did. Right up until the FBI raided it and the president ended up sitting in a federal prison. The degrees are worthless. Often these “schools” will choose names that resemble real universities (as in this case, New York's Columbia University).

If it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Diploma mills abound at both the high school and college level. In particular, since the mid-1990s and the advent of the World Wide Web, they have grown exponentially. While the Internet has been a tremendous boon to education in many ways, it has also spawned in greater numbers these decades-old scams.

How can you be sure that your degree will be accepted by employers and by academia? Simple. Make sure that they are properly accredited. However, just as there are diploma mills, there are also accreditation mills. Diploma mills, ever eager for your cash, have set up accreditation mills.

Yes, what I am saying is that you must first ensure that the accreditor is up to snuff before deciding the school is likewise. It can be a little confusing, but it is more important than which school you attend or how much it will cost. Make the wrong choice and you have a worthless piece of paper.

Unfortunately, making that wrong choice can be all too easy. Take, for example, the advertisements for schools on a website like Amazon.com. One would think that the advertisements are carefully screened, but in actuality, the ads flow from the fine folks at Google and they don’t screen. Many of these are diploma mills. If you don’t actively block those “schools” from your sites, they automatically appear on your website. And you can be very sure that most sites are not blocking these websites. They want the money.

Why is this a bad thing? Because many people will believe that if an advertisement is on Amazon (or About.com or many, many other sites), the school must be legitimate. Not true at all. I’m rather vocal about these parasitic schools and I can’t even get Amazon to stop having degree mill ads on their pages which sell my books.

In the United States, there are six regional accrediting bodies that account for the vast majority of colleges and universities. If your choice is a U.S.-based school, a school accredited by one of these organizations is your safest bet. All legitimate schools will list the regional accreditor on its Website.

The six regional accreditors are:

1. Middle State Association of Colleges and Schools
2. New England Association of Schools and Colleges
3. North Central Association of Colleges and Schools
4. Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges
5. Southern Association of Colleges and Schools
6. Western Association of Schools and Colleges

The Distance Education and Training Council also offers legitimately accredited degrees. DETC, through their own research, readily admits that their degrees are not as acceptable as regionally accredited ones. The problem occurs when you want to take that DETC bachelor's degree and go for an RA master's degree. Many schools will not accept the degree in transfer.