Complexities in legislative Suppression of diploma mills.

• Author: Gollin, George

INTRODUCTION

The connection between education and personal economic advantage drives a global market for higher education. Diploma mills, businesses that sell bogus degrees to customers in search of easy credentials, are a dark response to these market forces. The easy profits and minimal risk associated with selling degrees to this market lead those who traffic in unearned university credentials to build sophisticated businesses that are international in footprint and global in customer base. They create networks of fake universities, accrediting bodies, government agencies, and credential evaluating services that are full-blown imitations of the web of legitimate colleges, universities, and administrative structures that comprise international higher education. (1)

It is quite possible that diploma mills sell more degrees than are issued by all the colleges and universities in any single state except for New York and California. (2) Roughly five percent of the buyers are federal employees; another five percent are state government workers. (3) Perhaps one-fifth of the degrees are sold to foreign customers. One-third of the degrees are at the postgraduate level. (4) The ranks of diploma mill customers include U.S. intelligence officers and other government workers, engineers, public school teachers, a college president, and bogus physicians and psychiatrists who take on unsuspecting patients. (5)

Surely diploma mills pose threats to public safety. We do not want untrained engineers designing our airliners, or untrained physicians running pharmaceutical research programs. And we do not want our children taught by teachers with purchased credentials. National security issues are significant: foreign customers could use their purchased credentials to seek U.S. entry visas. (6) In the developing world, where doctors, engineers, and teachers are in desperately short supply, the bribery of education officials by diploma mills can interfere with the establishment of legitimate universities. We know from recent history that problems and conflicts from unstable and failed states overflow national boundaries and spread through the rest of the world.

Nearly all legitimate U.S. colleges and universities award degrees under legal authority issued by a state government. It is natural to expect the states to play the leading role in suppressing illegal degree providers since these businesses are operated in violation of state laws, not federal laws. However, state lawsuits against diploma mills have often been ineffective, doing little more than causing a diploma mill to relocate to a different jurisdiction from which it continues to sell its product unimpeded.

There is a natural federal interest in helping the states suppress the illegal sale of academic degrees. But the only organized federal response to the problem of diploma mills was discontinued by the FBI in 1991, some years before the Internet-driven boom in the degree mill business began. (7) Though it sued the "University Degree Program" in 2003, the Federal Trade Commission did so as a secondary action to accompany its complaint regarding fake international drivers' licenses that the organization had been selling. (8) The few criminal cases that have been brought in recent years have relied on mail and wire fraud statutes. (9) But degree mill customers generally understand the true nature of the product they purchase. (10) In the recent prosecution of the St. Regis University diploma mill, the defense argued that there was no fraud, since willing customers bought these diplomas knowing they were not legitimate degrees. (11)

There have been signs of renewed federal interest in the suppression of diploma mills. The Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs conducted two days of hearings on the problem in 2004, though the committee never proposed any legislation. (12) The House version of the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act held over a dozen pages concerning diploma mills. (13) But much of the bill's diploma mill content was deleted by the conference committee that wrote the final version--even so, the bill's definition of the term "diploma mill" remained, and has now become law. (14) Congressional interest in additional legislation appears to be present. (15)

During informal meetings the authors have had with Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice staff attorneys, all have recommended the creation of a federal statute that directly, clearly, and unambiguously classifies diploma mills and accreditation mills as criminal enterprises. (16) In this Article, we discuss the federal-state partnership and the possible shape of a federal law that would criminalize the operation of a diploma mill. To better understand what would make effective federal legislation, we will first look at an example of a recent successful prosecution of a diploma mill, St. Regis University. We will then look at the current state of the field, to see where state and federal efforts to suppress diploma mills have been successful and where they have come up wanting. With this history in mind, we will explore a possible federal solution, focusing on clear definitions of the terms associated with diploma mills and the criteria upon which an organization would be found a diploma mill.

It will be helpful to describe what we are actually trying to eradicate. We begin with St. Regis University, the most sophisticated of diploma mills uncovered so far.

1. THE NINE-YEAR ARC AND RAPID IMPLOSION OF THE ST. REGIS UNIVERSITY DIPLOMA MILL

   Dixie and Steve Randock, the owners of the St. Regis diploma mill, ran their business from Spokane, Washington. But the personnel, mail drops, and affiliated "campuses" of St. Regis eventually spanned at least eighteen states and twenty-two countries. The Randocks bribed Liberian officials to obtain university credentials, claiming that their non-existent schools were properly accredited universities based in Monrovia. They ultimately came to exert significant control over portions of the Liberian government as that country emerged from a catastrophic civil war. (17)

   In 1999, the Randocks began selling academic credentials inscribed with names like "Holy Acclaim University" and "Audentes Technical Academy." (18) They identified their organization as the "Advanced Education Institute Trust," describing its degree-granting entities not as schools, but as "Academic Peer Advisory Programs [that] are privately held Peer Evaluation and Endorsement Advisory Trusts, which are not bound to rigid curriculums [sic] or standards typically required by universities that are attended for the accumulation of 'credits' or 'units.'" (19) To clarify their use of the words "college" and "university" in the names of their non-schools, they explained "[i]t must be stressed that the Academic Peer Advisories use words including 'college,' 'university,' 'academy,' etc., not as nouns, but as the lexis in their descriptive titles. The names are titles of Academic Peer Advisories, NOT schools." (20)

   In 2001, the Randocks invented St. Regis University. In 2002, they sent Richard Novak, the "Chief Academic Officer," to Washington, D.C. in search of ministerial recognition for St. Regis. (21) A former car salesman, Novak boldly knocked on the door of the Liberian embassy, explained the reason for his visit, and was introduced to Abdulah Dunbar, the embassy's deputy chief of mission. Novak successfully negotiated the price of Liberian university accreditation down to $2,250 from Dunbar's original asking price of $4,000, and returned home with the same set of credentials that would have been issued to a legitimate Liberian university.

   The Randocks began asserting that St. Regis had been chartered by Liberia in 1984, even though the earliest versions of the St. Regis web pages (dating from 2001 or 2002) had claimed the "school" was on the Caribbean island of Dominica. Lawrence Bestman, Executive Director of Liberia's National Commission for Higher Education, sent a copy of the St. Regis "charter" to Alan Contreras (one of the authors of this article) in response to his article in International Higher Education expressing skepticism about the legitimacy of St. Regis. (22) The charter was purportedly "issued this 25th day of March A.D. 1984," but the document stated "[It]he University offers distance-learning programs through post, Internet, and Fax for the courses and degrees mentioned in Section 1." (23) The Internet was nothing more than a research project in 1984. It was only after the 1993 introduction of NCSA Mosaic, the first modern web browser, that public exploitation of the Internet became possible. Therefore, by purporting to be unmodified since 1984, the St. Regis charter is undoubtedly false.

   Over time, Novak and the Randocks arranged payments to about a dozen Liberian officials. The Randocks were able to effect a restaffing of the Liberian embassy in order to remove an uncooperative charge d'affaires so that Dunbar could run the embassy and vouch for St. Regis. (24) They came to control the content of the embassy's website, posting Liberia's only public list of "recognized" universities there. (25) Many were diploma mills. (26) The Randocks created the "National Board of Education," which sold Liberian university accreditation to other diploma mills. They put Liberia's Minister of Justice (now an Associate Supreme Court Justice) to the task of negotiating a degree-laundering arrangement with the University of Liberia. (27) A handful of senior Ministry of Education officials were in the pay of St. Regis, effectively granting the Randocks control of the Ministry's higher education functions. (28) Andrew Kronyanh, the deputy chief of mission of the Liberian embassy in Ghana, was paid to vouch for St. Regis. Caston Bob Harris, an official stationed in Paris, was hired to persuade the International Association of Universities (IAU), an affiliate of the United Nations...