"Purchased" Degrees

[Dollie]

This is an interesting topic I ran across on a discussion board. Instead of copying and pasting the post, I'll paraphrase.

A gentleman hired Nice Guy a few years ago. After an extended evening of drinking recently, the Nice Guy new hire (not a new hire anymore) confessed that his degree was purchased online. Note that this is a purchased degree, not an earned degree. The degree was obtained from a website who "represent universities who grant degrees based on "work history" and "previous college credits." There's no actual university attendance."

Now this gentleman is wondering if he should keep the employee or not. He states that technically, the degree is legal. He is still torn, however, because the new hire is a Nice Guy.

Is this unethical or just underhanded? Devious or brilliant?

Thoughts?

 

[CajunCenturion]

==? I think its safe to say though that we all agree that degree or not, EXPERIENCE is the key factor.

I wouldn't agree with "the key factor", but I would accept "a factor". Experience is generally focused and not broad-based. As lionelhill stated, an earned accredited degree provides a broad-based foundation, and that something that experience will not provide. When you are faced with challenges that lie outside your comfort are or are of experience, I'd much rather have someone who has a formal broad-based foundation upon which to draw.

The other trap about experience is properly understanding its quantity. There is a big difference between ten years experience, and one years experience ten times.

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[langleymass]

Perhaps this person should consider whether or not the person can actually do the work. If he can do it, keep him. If not, don't keep him.

 

[lionelhill]

Langleymass, I'd agree with you were it not for the honesty-factor. The person may well be doing the work very adequately, but they have proven themselves to have a certain level of dishonesty. Depending on the situation, I might not be happy with that. To take an extreme example, I wouldn't trust someone to work on a personel database if they had fiddled their own CV.

 

[langleymass]

It sounds like yet another case of an employer not investigating the person he hired. I suppose I could make up a degree from something like "Fifth Street University." It's the employer's job to investigate whether or not it is a legitimate.

Most people fiddle with their resumes nowadays. They leave off short-term stuff if they got screwed on a particular job.

How many degrees are "earned" anyway? Does the girl who sleeps with her professors earn her degree? Does the athlete who gets C's just to stay on the football team earn his degree?

 

[theputt]

A number of questions come to my mind, not the least of which is "Does he do the job he was hired to do?" If the answer to that is "No" then the answer is obvious, albeit apparently a long time overdue since he's been around for years. Was the possession of a degree a requirement for the job for which he was applying or was it something he just had in his resume to beef it up?

The next question that comes to mind is whether integrity is an important thing to the firm's management. If he lied about that part of his resume, did he also lie about other parts? Along this same line, having this person in the company might have far-reaching results if the company were to be hired by a government agency to do any work where security clearances were involved. If a background check were conducted that revealed the purchased degree, it could result in the loss of the contract. But that's going a bit afield.

The gentleman now has another problem, brought on by the Nice Guy in that he is now involved in the duplicity. If he does not take any action or report the situation, he becomes an accomplice after the fact, so to speak. If something happens down the road that causes the matter to come out into the open and Nice Guy says, "But I told the gentleman about it a long time ago.", then the gentleman is going to have to explain his action, or lack of action, to somebody.

I think that the gentleman needs to do a little checking-up on Nice Guy to see what else, if anything, is flakey about his background. If nothing else comes up and he feels that Nice Guy is guilty of a one-time lapse of judgement and is performing the job he was hired to do, then make up a statement stating what occured, what he did when he found out about the situation and why he felt that keeping the person on as an employee was appropriate. File that away in an appropriate location and/or discuss it with his superior (possibly without naming names) and let the matter rest.

Tom