Table 6.-Percentile Norms for Number of Honorary Degrees Per Thousand Earned Degrees for 542 Institutions from Foundation Similarly, any institution, by taking the data given for its own graduates and recipients of honorary degrees can determine its percentile ranking in comparison with the total of 542 reporting institutions. Table 6 shows a median of 11 honorary degrees per thousand earned degrees. Half of the institutions fall between ratios of 31 per thousand and 3 per thousand. Any institution exceeding the upper quartile, 31 per thousand, may well examine its practices to see whether it is conferring an abnormally large number of honorary degrees. Since practices with reference to honorary degrees tend to vary with type and control of the institution, table 7 has been prepared to show norms at 5 key points for various groupings of institutions, including denominational groups having 10 or more institutions each. Table 7.-Percentile Norms at Five Points Showing Number of Honorary Degrees for Each Thousand Earned Degrees Awarded by Institutions, Classified by Type of Control, from Foundation to June 30, 1955 Since practices with reference to honorary degrees also are conditioned in part by the size of the institution, table 8 has been prepared to show similar percentile norms at five key points for five groupings of institutions according to size. Table 8.-Percentile Norms at Five Points Showing Number of Honorary Degrees for Each Thousand Earned Degrees Awarded by Institutions, Classified by Size of Enrollment, From Foundation to June 30, 1955 B Chapter VI ECAUSE NO FEDERAL AGENCY exercises legal control over institutions of higher education and because the laws of many States are or have been so lax in controlling the chartering and operation of colleges and universities, a variety of institutions have been organized and have granted academic degrees that are not recognized as creditable or legitimate in the academic world. A "degree mill" may be defined as a commercial enterprise purporting to be a legitimate institution of higher education which sells a "degree" or more often a variety of degrees, occasionally requiring token effort but never the scholastic work normally expected by reputable institutions. While some of these institutions offer courses in residence, most of them operate as correspondence institutions exclusively. Their "campus" usually consists only of a post office box and a desk, or in the more ambitious types, a suite of offices. Their business is chiefly interstate or international based on advertising through circulars, catalogs, letterheads, and popular magazines. Their deputies or agents are often called "registrars." A variety of names have been attached to these institutions and the worthless degrees secured from them such as questionable, shady, phony, bogus, shyster, sham, fly-by-night, counterfeit, fake, pseudo, fraudulent, and spurious. In this monograph this type of degree will be referred to by the term "spurious," and the institutions offering them as "degree mills." These disreputable degree factories or degree mills have done great damage to legitimate higher education not only in the United States but even more abroad, where the variety of control of education by the different States in this country often is not realized. This educational evil, the degree mill, is by no means a recent development. One, such institution, Richmond College, was chartered as early as 1835. Forty years later the Commissioner of Education wrote: The sale of diplomas in foreign countries has become a great disgrace to institutions of learning in the United States. There should be some way to put an effective stop to the occasion of the scandal.1 1 Commissioner of Education, Annual Report, 1876, p. cxxii. Frequently in later reports the Commissioner referred to this disreputable and damaging practice but showed that the Federal Government was powerless to control it. The extent of these degree mills is not known with certainty. Even when the more flagrant ones have been put out of business, they easily reappear under a new name and in another location but with the same irresponsible and fraudulent management. Benjamin Fine wrote in the New York Times (Feb. 7, 1950): "More than 1,000 questionable or outright fraudulent schools and colleges in this country are fleecing unsuspecting students of millions of dollars annually." The most recent publication in this field states that "one association, that represents many of these phony colleges and universities, *** states that their annual business amounts to $75 million, and that their enrollment in one recent year was 750,000 students." 2 In the decade from 1942 to 1952 the Federal Trade Commission issued "cease and desist" orders against 174 such "educational" institutions, and 213 more entered into stipulations with the Commission and thus avoided formal hearings and probable resultant "cease and desist" orders. Not all of these were institutions of collegiate rank, but a large number of them were. At present it is too easy for many of these institutions to appear again under the same management but with a change of name and location. At a press conference, Oct. 29, 1959, Secretary Arthur S. Flemming, of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, said: "Degree mills have become such a blight on the American education scene that I have come to the conclusion that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has a responsibility to do something about them." He instructed the Commissioner of Education to prepare for publication a list of all presently known degree mills and promised strong warnings to the public on the tactics of their operators and the worthless character of degrees conferred by them.3 In view of this forthcoming list of institutions, it is unnecessary and inappropriate to discuss spurious institutions fully in this monograph. It is limited to a study of some of the specific spurious degrees granted or offered by these degree mills. The Office of Education has a file reaching back for a half century giving information of various sorts on hundreds of these institutions. In some cases this file includes institutional catalogs or announcements, but more frequently it is limited to copies of correspondence, especially from foreign countries, con Robert H. Reid, American Degree Mills: A Study of Their Operations and of Existing and Potential Ways to Control Them. Washington: American Council on Education, 1959, p. 7. See also Ronald Schiller, "Diploma Mills: America's Educational Underworld," Reader's Digest, June 1960, pp. 53-57. Reported in part in Higher Education, 16:14-15, December 1959. A preliminary list of 35 degree mills was announced by the Secretary at a press conference, April 11, 1960. cerning specific degrees granted and their possible recognition by agencies in those countries as bases for employment or promotion of the innocently victimized holders of these degrees. Too often the result abroad has been the repudiation not only of these particular degrees, but of many American degrees, except those from well-known and established institutions. In preparing lists of degrees for the present monograph, an examination was made of this file in the Office of Education and information tabulated on all degrees mentioned in it. This tabulation necessarily is very incomplete for the whole field of spurious institutions and degrees, but it is sufficient to indicate something of their nature and extent. A distinction should be made between two types of degrees given or offered by these spurious institutions: (1) those purporting to be legitimate degrees, duplicating those given by legitimate institutions, such as Bachelor of Arts, Master of Science, and Doctor of Philosophy, the latter being most frequently offered by spurious institutions; and (2) spurious degrees, not given or offered by any legitimate institutions, but unique to the degree mills. A summary of the degrees of different levels of these two types is shown in table 9. Table 9.-Academic Degrees Reported by Degree Mills, by Type and Level It will be noted that more than half of the degrees offered by these degree mills are spurious degrees, invented by these institutions. They include not only degrees of many types of bachelor, master, and doctor, but new varieties never heard of in legitimate institutions, such as "Diplomat" and "Philosopher" in various fields. No reference in chapter IX is made to the degrees offered by spurious institutions which are the same as the legitimate degrees there listed. Those of this type reported by 10 or more spurious institutions each, are the following: |