A global network of fraudulent online universities is using high-pressure sales tactics and phony scholarships to extract money from students who end up with worthless degrees.
Graduate schools and potential employers who check degrees would not accept qualifications from the institutions in this network, leaving any graduates from the institutions unable to move on in their professional or academic careers.
An expert presented with the details of the network saw plenty of room for suspicion. ‘I see the commonalities and duplication of material across their websites and I have to assume they’re all fake,’ said George Gollin, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gollin tracks down diploma mills—pretend universities that issue worthless degrees—and exposes them. One investigation he participated in resulted in the owners of a diploma mill serving jail time.
The universities in the network, which typically say they are based in the United States, actively encourage students from the Arab world to enroll by offering what appear to be generous scholarships after just a few minutes of exchanging instant messages online. But that financial aid comes with a hook—the students are supposed to pay the rest of the fees immediately.
Some of the students who fall prey to these tactics don’t realize their degrees are worthless until after receiving them. Studying at the universities is a lonely experience—students at one of the schools in the network said they had no contact with professors at all.
At least some of the universities in the network appear to be entirely fraudulent although they try to give the appearance of quality by citing an accreditation organization that is actually part of their network. (See accompanying article, “Faking Quality Control for Universities.”)
Accreditation, a practice more common in Europe and North America, audits the quality of universities to ensure students are getting a proper standard of education. Several different associations do this and some of them also accredit universities in the Arab world.
But academics listed as working for the accreditation organization in the fraudulent network said they had no idea they were named as consultants until contacted by a reporter for an interview.
An International Network
The discovery of the elaborate network unfolded over several weeks.
The founder of the Abu Dhabi based Edu Alliance education consulting company, Dean Hoke, came across a press release outlining efforts to “enhance the higher education standards” in the Arab world by an organization called the “Middle East Office of Academic Regulation & Examination.”
That name didn’t sit right with Hoke, so he explored the organization’s website. A live-chat pop up screen appeared, and he typed into it.
The online representative from the organization asked for Hoke’s credit card details in order to approve a hefty scholarship. The idea of an accreditation organization, which operates at an institutional level, offering financial aid to individuals seemed wrong to Hoke.
The organization said it acted on the authority of the “Gulf Ministry of Higher Education.” But a government official in the region said no such organization exists.
“This is just absolute rubbish,” says Badr Aboul-Ela, the director of the Commission for Academic Accreditation at the Ministry of Education in the United Arab Emirates. “There is no single ministry for the entire Gulf region.”
When a reporter called the Middle East Office of Academic Regulation & Examination, the operator identified himself as a staffer in an institution called MUST University. That comment seems to have been a slip up.
MUST University says on its website that it is the world’s largest university with a presence in more than 180 countries.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: https://chronicle.com/article/Worlds-Largest-University/190337
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