Cheaters beware. It is now a misdemeanor in Missouri to use a fake degree or one from a diploma mill to apply for a job, admission to a college or in connection with any business, job or public office.

Gov. Jay Nixon is scheduled to sign a bill today that will make it so. In doing so, Missouri joins about a dozen other states that have similar laws on the books.

The Missouri Department of Higher Education had pushed legislators to create such a bill to make sure Missouri is not a friendly place to phony diplomas and transcripts that are readily available on the Internet.

The department discovered a couple of cases in Missouri — including a St. Charles couple who tried to pass off fake degrees from St. Charles Community College and Lindenwood University to get teaching jobs in Florida. (See my story from December that I have pasted below for more on this.)

Leroy Wade, an assistant commissioner of higher education, noted in a news release that most often the use of fake degrees goes undetected.

“Unless an employer has a reason to be suspicious, they often accept documentation at face value,” he said. “The new legislation calls attention to the problem and puts people on notice that using phony documents is a crime.”

Some educators in Missouri fear a rise in phony degrees

Bogus transcripts and diplomas offer instant credentials to help in a tough job market

Monday, 12/8/2008

By Kavita Kumar

Kathy Brockgreitens-Gober was floored several months ago when the education department in Florida sent her a copy of a transcript that purported to be from St. Charles Community College, where she is the registrar.

The transcript had the college’s name and address on it, but it was otherwise completely fictitious - down to the A’s and B’s the supposed student had given herself.

“None of it was correct,” said Brockgreitens-Gober. “Those were not our course numbers or course titles.”

The person claiming to be a St. Charles Community College alumnus was a St. Charles resident who had applied for a teaching certificate in Florida.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Brockgreitens-Gober received another fake transcript that was exactly the same, except the first name was different.

“In my 21 years, this is the first time I’ve ever come across this,” she said. The only similar thing she’s seen was when students occasionally tried to change their grades on their transcripts.

Some estimates suggest that as many as 200,000 phony degrees are issued every year, according to the Missouri Department of Higher Education. The Internet is full of operations that will fabricate degrees to fit anyone’s educational aspirations - for a fee, of course.

But experts acknowledge that it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how many are being used to get jobs because they are only flagged if an employer becomes suspicious and asks a school to verify a transcript or degree.

While area universities say they only see a handful of fake transcripts, if any at all, every year, some worry that the economic recession will push more people to seek them out.

“When I look at the economic times and people out of work, there may be more people trying to use this to get a leg up in the job market,” said Eric Stuhler, legal counsel for Lindenwood University. “The potential for future fraud is enormous.”

The St. Charles resident who sent fake transcripts to the Florida education department also sent a phony record from Lindenwood. Stuhler has referred the case to St. Charles law enforcement authorities in the hopes that they bring fraud charges against the resident.

“Imagine a situation where someone purports to have a degree from our university and starts teaching elementary school with absolutely no training or background,” Stuhler said.

Officials at the Missouri Department of Higher Education are pushing lawmakers to pass a bill next session that would make it a misdemeanor to use a fake degree or one from a diploma mill to get a job in the state. Phony transcripts could be prosecuted under existing fraud laws, but they rarely are, said Leroy Wade, assistant state commissioner of higher education.

Also, current state laws do not make it illegal for Missourians to use degrees from diploma mills to land jobs, Wade said. Diploma mills are bogus institutions that usually are not regulated and require little to no course work. They will give so-called degrees to people who pay them.

A prominent example of a large diploma mill that was busted earlier this year was St. Regis University, which operated in Washington state. At least four Missourians were among the 9,600 people who bought or tried to buy a degree from the diploma mill.

St. Regis’ operators also sold fake diplomas from real institutions. According to the Missouri Department of Higher Education, a man in 2002 paid the operators $1,800 for master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from “Missouri University.” The man specified that the diploma should say “Columbia, MO” on it and use black and gold ink.

“A lot of times these entities exist on the perimeter of our legal system,” Wade said. “They may be based in several states or based in foreign countries.”

Passing a law forbidding the use of such degrees to gain employment would “really send a signal to the people who operate these kinds of businesses or entities that Missouri takes these things seriously,” he said. “I think it will help deter them from seeing Missouri as a friendly place to do business.”

Eleven other states have laws that forbid the use of fake degrees in some way, Wade said.

The federal Government Accountability Office launched an investigation several years ago and reported that 463 federal employees had degrees from diploma mills or unaccredited schools, including at least 28 senior-level employees.

“There are literally hundreds of St. Regis operations out there,” Wade said. “The pressure in both education and the workplace to have credentials and to have higher credentials to be eligible for pay raises in incredible.”

Brockgreitens-Gober said it’s fairly easy to recognize questionable transcripts these days since most colleges print them on special paper that can’t easily be erased, altered or copied.

Brenda Selman, registrar at the University of Missouri-Columbia, said she sees five to 10 cases every year of fake or altered transcripts that are first flagged by third parties - usually employers or other universities.

As technology and copiers get more advanced, she said, people have more tools to try to emulate the sophistication of college transcripts. However, she said, most of the fake transcripts that have come through her office were not close to the real thing and often were just printed on plain, white paper.

Besides the paper quality and features, there is often another tip-off, she said.

“They are not always very good at knowing how to calculate the various grade point averages, so their math is sometimes off,” Selman said.

The Grade is the St. Louis region’s premier blog on education and child welfare. To read other recent posts, go to www.stltoday.com/thegrade.