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PHANTOM UNIVERSITIES Selling fake degrees might be a criminal act — buying them nearly an act of civil disobedience, a carnevalesque move for equal opportunities.    | Isidor Grim (LEIPZIG). I found this spamlooking advertisement in my mailbox. Did you, too? It is really a pity: my head is not small enough to fit to this doctoral cap!    The ones who offer these BAs, MAs, PhDs etc. sail close to the wind, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), America’s consumer protection agency, chances are good that the ad is from a “diploma mill,” a company that offers “degrees” or certificates for a flat fee, requires little course work, if any, and awards degrees based solely on life experience. Unfortunately many of these diploma mills which take on names, that are very similar to well-known colleges or universities, have an “accreditation” only from a bogus, but official-sounding agency that they created, instead of the US Department of Education.    BBC and CBS reported, already in 2003, of many of these fakes like the well-sounding London’s Strassford University, “founded during the reign of Queen Victoria” — without even a building.    They are sophisticated, as even the FBI admitted: buyers not only get a fake diploma, they get a bogus transcript with grades for courses never taken and even letters of recommendation. In March 2003 several websites offering fake British degrees for up to £1,000 each have been closed down following a four year joint operation in the UK and US. The certificates, from 14 made-up institutions, were used by hundreds of unqualified people, mainly in North America, to gain jobs in areas such as teaching, computing and childcare. The operation, which employed 30 staff in Romania, targeted millions of people every day with circular e-mails. Among the institutions created for the websites were the University of Palmers Green, the University of Wexford and Harrington University. The operation, run by a man and a woman, both Israeli, was based at offices in Israel, Romania and the US. It is thought to have made millions of pounds. And now the sly dogs are on the road again! But I’d like to remind that this isn’t just a legal matter. Tuition and university degrees are often too expensive for common people. Just in these days the New York Times reported that a slight change in the US government formular which defines the eligibility bar for financial aid in 2005 raised the family’s college bills up to $6000 p.a.. “For some students, it’s the difference between enrolling and not enrolling,” said Seamus Harreys, dean of student financial services at Boston’s Northeastern University.    Also in Europe the situation is worsening. More and more governments decide to go the “elite” way: cutting money for the public university system, raising (or introducing, as recently in Germany) tuition fees, diverge subsidies towards so called “excellency” education and re-search institutions (like in this very month in Italy) and abandoning the aim of a society with a wide spread and high education level in favour of a small highly qualified elite. In this sense fake degrees can also be seen as a carnivalesque revolt for equal opportunities and against the incorporation of knowledge into a monetary based social model. | references: FTC — BBC — CBS