I\u2019m dismayed at the sheer volume of spam email about \u201cgenuine\u201d diplomas for sale—cheap! On one hand, I playfully want to join the bandwagon: I\u2019m allied with The Wizard of Oz who created a Diploma for the Scarecrow because of his \u201ccleverness\u201d in rescuing Dorothy. Hey, why not? I can make up one for you for a few bucks\u2014what kind do you want?\u00a0 Much much cheaper than what these mountebanks are charging!<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve even started drawing these as a kind of humorous gift to friends. Not certifying actual competence in any field\u2014that would be lying\u2014but rather things like \u201ccertificate of adequacy,\u201d or \u201cdiploma of consciousness evolution.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s also a play on psychobabble, how we can use blarney to sound fancy when it\u2019s really hot air.<\/p>\n
The dismay hits because I wonder: Whoa! What if as many as 24% of the people in jobs today are there because employers are believing these sham diplomas and not checking them out? (And what if a fair number of statistical numbers are as confabulated\u2014just made up\u2014as I just did?) What if the percentage is greater?\u00a0 Hey, the people hiring don\u2019t seem to be checking out the immigration status or citizenship of thousands if not millions of illegal aliens, so why should we assume more responsibility on the part of the personnel department? (Excuse me, re-named the more prestigious \u201cHuman Resources.\u201d) I don\u2019t underestimate the desire under the pressure of cost-cutting in the department to cut corners, too (as described elsewhere on this blog<\/a>). Laziness, carelessness, overload, passive-aggressiveness (i.e., if they want results, I\u2019ll give them results. They never said anything about the results being really valid.), etc.<\/p>\n In a larger sense, the cheap diplomas for sale are a part of a culture of cheating\u2014about which some interesting books have been written. Scarey numbers of the percentages of people who cheat in college and professional and business graduate schools. Scarey the numbers of people who committed if not formal then informal fraud in effect claiming they could afford the homes they bought\u2014and then they couldn\u2019t by far! And scarey the number of people colluding with them, the ones who arranged for the loans, and processed or okayed them\u2014can we\u2014dare we\u2014recognize them as cheaters?\u00a0 Sure they\u2019ll have excuses, but come on\u2014we\u2019re not dealing with teenagers here. And as can be seen, it is this kind of cheating that has resulted in the robbing of millions of people\u2014perhaps billions\u2014of significant chunks of their life savings. Cheating.<\/p>\n I wonder how many people who get these offers register in their mind the evil\u2014that\u2019s the right word\u2014that is involved in debasing the trust level. What if your doctor or lawyer or some other trusted helper is the graduate of a diploma mill, a fraud? How do you know that is not so? Are you going to check to see which universities are in fact accredited?\u00a0 Maybe you should. Sorry to reinforce the low level of trust\u2014perhaps paranoia would be too strong a word\u2014 but caveat emptor<\/em>, buyer beware!\u00a0 And for those businesses who hire, are you indeed double-checking?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m dismayed at the sheer volume of spam email about \u201cgenuine\u201d diplomas for sale—cheap! On one hand, I playfully want to join the bandwagon: I\u2019m allied with The Wizard of Oz who created a Diploma for the Scarecrow because of his \u201ccleverness\u201d in rescuing Dorothy. Hey, why not? I can make up one for you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,16,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-papers","category-foolin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}