I assume that if you earn a Bachelor’s in something, nobody cares if your secondary-education diploma was obtained through shady means, if only because the sets of knowledge are nearly disjoint: The secondary school education was about broad generalities, the undergraduate degree was focused on a specific field and about proving your competence in that field. The Bachelor’s proves you know that field, regardless of what else you don’t know which you should have learned prior to age eighteen.
However, what happens to a Master’s degree if the school which issued it finds out your Bachelor’s came from a diploma mill? Does a Ph.D. go away if the issuing university finds out your Master’s was bogus? How about if it finds out your Master’s was fine, but your Bachelor’s came from someplace where the campus was a trailer park and the dean was the owner’s cat?
Did the person commit complete and utter fraud? Say, “I have a BA from Harvard.” when it’s from someplace else, or none at all? That may lose you the advanced degree—or not. You’d be surprised how lax some schools can be.
You embarrass the school or get involved in a public scandal and yes you’ll probably lose it. If it’s a medical degree, and you have any fraud at all, you’ll lose your license regardless.
I don’t know if schools check with other schools to see if you graduated. That should be pretty easy now. For my last graduate degree I had to show up with a certified copy of my transcript and that was it.
Sometimes if the undergraduate school is not accredited they won’t let you in the graduate program. Accreditation is very powerful for legit schools.
I will say that if you have a Masters but you have fraud relating to your Bachelors, you can not only lose a government job, you can be prosecuted for fraud. It doesn’t matter if the Master’s is good or not.
However, if you take the wrong undergraduate classes–you can lose your advanced degree or have it changed to something else. Say you took Chemistry rather than Physics for your bachelors. You then can’t get an MSEE because of ‘accreditation issues’. Thank you grad school for not telling me that for the first year of my masters. Just for that I refuse to remember anything from Circuits.
I’ve never heard of this, and I’ve known plenty of people who went from one undergraduate major to a different grad school major (sometimes very different).
I’d be surprised if anything happened. A prior degree is an entrance requirement, not a component of the final award of competence – which is measured independently, by whatever means the school has decided is appropriate.
That is, if you can prove to the satisfaction of your thesis committee that you deserve a PhD, they would presumably award you one, regardless of your antecedents. If they found out you never actually got the BS degree, or got it from a Russian mail-order school instead of from MIT, the most I can see them doing is shrugging and wondering at your ability to recover in graduate school. (It is in principle possible to be admitted to a PhD program without a BS degree entirely, although you would have to be really something for an admissions committee to take a chance like that.)
There are certainly licensing requirements and professional society requirements that would be violated if you had a fraudulent degree, e.g. you might lose a medical license or accreditation to the bar, certification by some professional society or other. But I think these are largely based on issues of integrity – that is, you lied – than about issues of professional competence.
And that’s not to say that the granting institution itself might not take similar action on similar ethical grounds in some egregious case. After all, the faculty of the department merely recommend an award of a PhD, it’s actually granted by the regents/fellows/board of the university. I would assume the university can revoke the recognition regardless of the academic opinion, if it wants to.
While most of these examples are degrees being revoked because of plagiarism, at least one person had her degree revoked when it turned out her grades were “simply pulled from thin air” and a Harvard grad lost his degree when he turned out to be a Russian spy with a false identity.
Oh, you can switch majors, but to get an MSEE you have to have an undergraduate degree from an accredited university in physics, mathematics, or engineering. Chemistry doesn’t count.
However, If someone gets a degree from a diploma mill, I’d be surprised if a legit school would accept for entry into a graduate program it due to accreditation issues. So, it’s unlikely that a person could get into a legit graduate school with a diploma mill undergraduate degree, and therefore the issue of losing a graduate degree is moot.
Very interesting discussion from everyone, and I didn’t know that it was even theoretically possible to get a PhD without “paying your dues” moving up the ladder. (Other than an honorary doctorate, but those don’t count, right?)
Maybe this should be a separate thread, but it is related, so: Is it possible for a school to retroactively lose accreditation? I imagine this would be the result of some long-standing corruption finally coming to light. On the one hand, the school did shady stuff and maybe its degrees should be looked at skeptically; on the other, the students who went through it shouldn’t have the rug pulled out from under them like that.
Oh yes. The only actual case I knew was were the person was teaching, so the university had a separate jeopardy, but yes. The university system (here) is an enterprise dependent on the value of earned degrees. It subverts the whole system to admit to accepting a bogus undergraduate or intermediate degree.
I don’t think accreditation works like that. And even if it did, I don’t think it would have that effect.
You do get the situation where students are lead to believe that they will be getting an accredited degree, and find out three years down the track that it’s never going to happen. And potentially, you could have students starting on a properly accredited degree, only to have the accreditation pulled before they graduate.
But the consumers don’t have the mechanisms for dealing with retroactive action, so even if the accreditation groups had the mechanism for retroactive action, (which they don’t), it would be difficult for people to get a handle on it.
I worked in this area for a university in London for the best part of twenty years. Unless you have a case of total identity fraud in front of you (genuine credentials, but the body presenting them is someone else), then any halfway competent administrator would (a) expect to see original documentation (b) have information resources to check on institutions they’ve never heard of, before someone is even admitted in the first place.
Having been on the other end (so to speak), even to the point in one case of getting a trip to Orlando on the FBI to give evidence a certificate purporting to come from my institution, in my experience frauds of this kind are usually so amateurish as to be obvious to spot.
However, if someone genuinely got all the way through a qualification satisfactorily, did all the required coursework and passed all the examinations, then any halfway competent administrator would find a way to quietly get the absence of proper prior qualifications excused (there should always be some escape clause to provide a route for the able, deserving but not formally qualified student), so as to avoid embarrassment to the institution.
I didn’t know that. Is that a national requirement that universities have to follow in order to have their MSEE program accredited, or a particular university’s rule?
P.S. The University of California, San Diego (https://ece.ucsd.edu/gradapply) website says that to be admitted to the MS EE program you need “B.S. and/or M.S. degree in engineering, physical sciences, or mathematics from an accredited college or university” which would seem to include chemistry.
I know someone (he was a fellow grad student with me) who earned a PhD in math without either a HS diploma or any college degree. He had somehow gotten to a pilot in the navy (as a HS dropout? Yes, this was during the Korean war; they needed people and he somehow charmed them into accepting him). He got interested in math, used to hang around the dept at Penn and sit in on advanced graduate courses. Finally someone suggested he apply to the grad program, he did, and wrote a decent thesis. He then got hired in a university position, moved up the ranks to full professor and must be retired by now. But there was never any suggestion that he misrepresented any of this.
I’ve known several people admitted to college from 11th grade in HS, in fact one was in 10th, although he never actually finished. And many people (including me) have skipped a master’s and gone on directly to a PhD. The point is that if you satisfy the requirements for a degree, nobody cares what you had done previously.
Reminds me of a State Gov job I kept trying to get. And it was a sucky entry level job at that. The only reason I was interested was I REALLY wanted to live right there AND I REAllY wanted to further my education at that major university in that town.
They kept rejecting my application for various trivial reasons. But the best one was that my degree wasn’t one of the “physical sciences”.
My degree is in PHYSICS.
Its right there in the damn name people!
They advertised that job slot for 5 years and maybe even closer to 10 IIRC.
Like **Hari Seldon’**s friend above, I also know someone who has a masters degree and a PHD without having earned a Bachelors. In his case he served in the Army as an electronics technician for 10 or so years. I think that experience was accepted, all in all, AFAIK he never has represented otherwise.
as a data point, I was accepted to the State University after my junior year in HS, was exempt from freshman English classes altogether due to test scores yada yada yada. I drop out of college 2 years later, Fast forward 15+ years, now I am in nursing school and graduate. It is suddenly an issue that I do not actually have an HS diploma and this is why I cannot take my nursing national exam that will grant me my license. Holy fuck, I finally satisfy the requirements via someone pencil whipping of the requirements ( thank you Dr. Washington!) I wound up with a HS graduation date that is 2 months after my nursing school graduation date but whatever. I am an RN now and that is what matters.
I call this credentialism. I guess it is what you expect from bureaucracy gone wild.
Many years ago, I read a sci-fi story of the near future in which having a PhD was a requirement for any job. This poor guy had earned his PhD, but it and all his other degrees were withdrawn when it turned out that he had not completed the phys ed requirement in kindergarten.
It just occurs to me that I don’t have a HS diploma either since, for historical reasons, my HS awarded a BA degree. It didn’t mean anything of course and I subsequently got a real BA.
You’re saying you’re first BA was FALSE? This calls into question…(see thread).
About your non-MA: I was in what my University (City University of New York) called an “en-route” Ph.D., which meant I entered with a Bachelor’s (in Music, so I had some strange background credentials to deal with), a program more “difficult” to enter: the idea being you study with the full gamut of graduate-level professors, not those just at your local college, where the MA is carried out. In theory you also skip a year (I think), but at the end of the day that little bastard is tucked in.
I know because after umpteen years amid the dusty wreckage of a doctoral thesis proposal I’ve got one somewhere.
I recently heard about the Supreme Court Justice Charles Evan Whittaker, who got his high school diploma as an adult, while simultaneously earning his law degree - he never did get a BS degree, though. Charles Evans Whittaker - Wikipedia