Watch out for diploma mills

With the growth of online degree programs and the ever-increasing opportunities for fraud, you might run into some candidates with education credentials that are meaningless — or downright fake.
Scrupulous degrees come in various forms. The worst of the bunch are pieces of paper provided by so-called diploma mills – basically, you pay a few hundred bucks, and they mail you a diploma. But they’ve gotten pretty sophisticated over the years. Here is a “university” that says your degree is accredited, even though there are no classes or tests. But the really scary part is, they’ll even give buyers a phony reference contact to give to potential employers.
The simple way around this is to find out if a school is accredited by a legitimate institution. Most diploma mills are accredited, but by bogus organizations that are set up solely to give such accreditations. But here is a searchable database of schools accredited by organizations recognized by the federal government.
Degrees without the wait
Then, of course, there are schools — online and otherwise — that offer real classes, but graduate students much faster than traditional programs. Some of these programs have come under fire recently for an alleged lack of quality (check out this article in the New York Times).
When candidates put those degrees on a resume it’s not as cut and dried as when they’re downright lying. Depending on the program and the person, the candidate may have learned as much as any student at a traditional school. This is where it’s really important to look at a candidate’s experience and use the interview to make sure he or she can make the transition from academics to the real world.