Diploma Mills and Distance Education

Distance ed is fine if your only goal is to learn for the sake of learning, but in no way does it pass for the rigorous training required for work in any professional or academic discipline. The hoops you jump through in academia ensure that initiates have a firm enough knowledge to translate their knowledge into real-world situations. Diploma mills, at best, teach only a basic grasp of theory and cannot teach the kind of mastery one needs a teacher-student interaction to ensure. At their worst, as in this case of fraud in the federal government, they issue fake diplomas from fake schools.

So how do "properly" educated people fail to notice that phony degree holders don't actually know what they claim? In this case, people did notice something was wrong, but it took a while. Part of it, I think, is that distance-ed institutions have risen very quietly in only the last 20 years or so. They take pains to distance themselves from traditional academia, and I think academics mistakenly assume that everyone knows ITT, for instance, is not the same as MIT, or that the University of Phoenix is not a real school, at least not in the same way the University of Arizona is.

But in the real world, people often don't notice the different. Part of it is that diploma mills sound like real schools, and part of it is that we, as a culture, are trained to be impressed by the letters "BA," "MA," and "PhD," well before we look at how those letters made their way to the end of someone's name. Part of it is that people just aren't getting good educations, even at real universities, and however many hoops they jumped through, many people would be hard-pressed to demonstrate much useful knowledge they have retained from their college educations. In an environment like this, it's much easier for holders of fake diplomas to bluff their way into positions they are really unqualified for. However, I maintain that a university education is far superior to an education, if any, that one receives through distance learning.

So should these kinds of schools be outlawed? I'm not sure. I think they are exposing a flaw in modern universities, which in their own way have become diploma mills, focusing more on numbers and statistics than on giving their students the best education they possibly can. Part of this is due to the job market, as the kinds of nontechnical jobs that once provided a solid middle-class lifestyle without requiring a college degree are disappearing (or moving to the Third World). This means people who might otherwise have been perfectly happy in these jobs are being forced to choose between a drastically reduced standard of living or a college degree. However, their hearts aren't truly interested in further education, just the attendant keg parties and the piece of paper that says they've done it. Part of it is due to funding cuts, forcing universities to sell themselves more, trying to attract as many paying students as possible both for their tuition and the greater levels of funds they'll receive from the state. (This of course doesn't apply to private institutions, but they have always been forced to market themselves, and even at world-reknowned institutions have been forced to deal with poor-quality students as a result of market forces.) But when the quality of the student is degraded, the quality of education must also degrade to account for the lower expectations and abilities of those who have no real desire to be in college in the first place.

Does this mean no one learns anything in college? Far from it. The opportunity for real education is still there, and many people pursue it. But it also means modern universities, especially state schools, have become more like diploma mills than I think they'd care to admit. Universities at present are a bridge between the ideals of a liberal education fostered by the schools of the past and the modern need for technical training even the relatively uninterested now have. Is the solution to separate these two camps, those who thirst for knowledge vs. those who want knowledge simply for a job, into two types of institutions? I don't know. At least in the modern university, the opportunity exists for students to move from one camp to the other. Separate is not necessarily equal. But I still think diploma mills point to the problems modern universities, public and private, have with the quality of their education and highlight the need for a solution.