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     studies

This page points to government and academic studies about the diploma mill industry and its impact.

A crisp introduction is provided by Not For Novelty Purposes Only: Fake Degrees, Phony Transcripts & Verification Services (PDF) and George Gollin's 2003 Unconventional University Diplomas from Online Vendors: Buying A PhD from a University That Doesn't Exist (PDF). Australian scholar George Brown has produced a range of cogent papers of particular value, discussing principles, malpractice and remedies.

The outstanding resource about US mills is Degree Mills, The Billion Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over A Million Fake Diplomas (Amherst: Prometheus 2005) by John Bear & Allen Ezell, which builds on the 1985 Fraudulent Credentials report to the US Congress regarding findings from 'Operation Dipscam'. Other works include Degrees for Sale (New York: Simon & Schuster 1972) by Lee Porter and Diploma Mills: Degrees of Fraud (New York: American Council on Education & Macmillan 1988) by David Stewart & Henry Spille.

For Australia a perspective is provided in George Brown's 2004 Protecting Australia's Higher Education System: A Proactive Versus Reactive Approach in Review (1999-2004) (PDF), discussing a number of Australian entities, and other works on his site. His forthcoming doctoral dissertation is likely to be of significant value.

For the Callahan case see Paul Sperry's 2005 article How doubts about the government's own "Dr. Laura" exposed a résumé fraud scandal. The General Accounting Office reported (PDF) on its investigation into online degree mills in 2001 and 2002. Claims of mills as a reflection of a broader 'cheating culture' feature in polemics such as David Callahan's The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong To Get Ahead (New York: Harcourt 2004).

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