My ex-SIL (RIP) dropped out of high school when she was 16 and later decided to clean up her life and go back to college so she started back at community college and then earned her BS in chemical engineering from a respectable university. She later changed careers, got her PhD in clinical psych and became a full, tenured college professor. I don’t know if she ever misrepresented herself but I am not sure if anyone ever asked either. She did all that without ever graduating from high school.
My little brother had to drop out of high school because of some insane zero-tolerance BS like you read about in the news. It didn’t stop him either. He went to community college then to a respectable state school, graduated and is now a Coast Guard officer by way of OCS. I know he didn’t misrepresent himself because they went through all of the circumstances during his background checks and he has a GED but he still never got to walk down the isle during high school graduation.
I’ve wondered about this question too. I think it is a fairly common fear among people who have completed a lot of schooling. Perhaps I actually cheated in third grade but can’t remember it. What if someone uncovers evidence of such long-ago bad behavior and I can’t come up with a defense? Will everything I’ve done since in academia come crashing down like a house of cards and leave me to take the GED and start applying to college like I was 18 again? Do I get to keep AP/CLEP/credit by exam/etc. credits or do those poof away too? Can I resubmit old projects for Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) credit or are those too “tainted” to count as worth anything since the knowledge I used to complete the projects was presumably stolen from gullible professors that thought I was worthy of being taught it?
I get that universities probably don’t want to formally define an exact schedule of penalties for fear of encouraging such behavior, but it would be interesting to know if there are any general principles.
Yep, I can get that there are two kinds of people who could end up advancing in academia on fraudulent credentials - people who have fraudulent credentials but who are actually competent in their field (and could handle higher degree work, etc.) and people who hide their incompetence behind fraudulent degrees and who would be found out if they attempted higher degree work, etc.
Presumably, the first group could be labeled “competent but dishonest” and could keep their degrees but be somehow “marked” as unworthy of employment in certain fields.
There is no law requiring your degree be respected, there is no law controlling how its disrespected.
The awarding institution can erase your degree - for whatever reason… there is no external law, it would be their own conditions and guidelines in use.
If the University of Rural Nevada was accredited , and then issued your degree , and subsequently is then dis-accredited, well the dis-accreditation may well be publicized as "should have lost accreditation back in the year XYZ " … So even if you have the degree, it would be viewed as valueless - there is no law that says it MUST be respected.
One area where a court battle might occur is in the workplace - eg if the institution is de-accredited, certain aspects of your employment may be in question … whether you fraudulently or wrongly became employed in that position (do they want to sack you or demote you ? ) , and whether the degree qualified you for higher pay (even if you stay working there doing the same job, they may just pay less by saying the degree isn’t really a degree. ) The battle would come down to whether there was real legitimacy of the degree … were you to know ?
Another singular data point. I had a college roommate who dropped out of high school but then got into a four year state college based on his community college transcript–which somehow did not require a HS Diploma to enroll. From CC, he got into a four year degree program.
IIRC, to get into his MBA program, he had to take the HS GED exam after getting a B.A. degree.
My own limited experience with this is my high school’s AP program was offered as second semester science courses at the local community college. They counted as 2nd semester courses at a real community college course and transferable in the state system, but when I when to my four year college, I had to go back and take the first semester courses after passing the second semester courses in HS. :smack:
My fiancé graduated high school in '91 and has a BS from '97. He just applied to community college for an extra certificate and they’re insisting that he send his transcript from high school. They don’t want his diploma. They actually want his transcript. I can’t imagine what they need it for. The second community college he applied to didn’t want anything from high school. They were happy with his college degree.
That might be easier to control for within a single country, but once you go international, oi vey! And “easier” doesn’t mean it’s going to be straightforward: I’ve had my diploma rejected by a same-country institution because “that school did not exist!” (yes it did, the college is older than the university to which it now belongs), and I’ve had coworkers who were very well-considered because they had a degree from an American university, at least one of whom was taking a further degree from a local university, paid for by our common employer.
No, physical sciences usually does not include chemistry. If chemistry is accepted it gets listed separatedly.
That may what this (or any other ) university means but “physical sciences” is generally used in contrast to “life sciences” , in which case chemistry would be a physical science. It includes a lot more than physics.
Senator Rand Paul earned an MD from Duke School of Medicine, but has no undergraduate degree. He dropped out of Baylor and enrolled at Duke prior to completing a bachelor’s degree in 1984. At that time Duke School of Medicine had no requirement of a bachelor’s degree for enrollment.
IME, “physical sciences” is used in comparison to “social sciences”, which includes psychology, sociology, anthropology, and sometimes other things like “gender studies” or “ethnic studies”. “Physical sciences”, then, would include chemistry as well as biology.
It’s not a perfect classification system. Ideally, someone who wanted one of a set of specific degrees should just list the degrees and not use a broad term that could be interpreted multiple ways. Better yet, one could just require “a degree” and then use an exam to determine if a candidate has enough mad leet physical science skillz for the program as you define them.
“Natural sciences” which includes the physical sciences and the life sciences is usually used to contrast with “social sciences”
Or even require a degree that includes some specific number of credits in physics. That’s something I’ve often seen in job requirements - for example, a requirement for a bachelor’s degree including 30 credits in accounting rather than requiring the degree in accounting.
Pre-Internet and computers, this was a lot harder to verify, so I suspect many more people got away with faking undergraduate and high school degrees for job applications, which are rarely applicable to the jobs themselves.
I got an MBA in 1998 and while my B.A. and high school degrees were real, we had many foreign students, particularly from India, who were enrolled in the MBA program that already claimed to have Master’s degrees in Computer Science. Those folks had seemingly no idea how to do anything remotely basic on a computer and with the primitive Internet that existed when we were in school, they needed a lot of hand holding despite each of them claiming they were very familiar with technology. It became clear many of these students had come from diploma mills in India, and used the existence of a fake Master’s degree as a basis for getting into this competitive MBA program. That said, the school did nothing to investigate it, and honestly how could they? If I’m in the business of setting up a diploma mill pre-Internet, and someone from the US calls to verify whether I am an accredited school and if Sanjay Punjabi went there, all I do is see if his check cleared and say “yes”, if it did.
This guy is a high school friend of mine, and I’ve known him ever since he ended up coming to my middle school for math classes because they’d run out of math to teach him at his primary school. (He had a similar problem in high school and ended up having to go to Northwestern U. for math classes, even though my high school offered 2 years of calculus.). By “his graduate work was at the University of Illinois,” the writer means that he dropped out after his freshman year to go to Budapest and never finished his undergrad degree. Of course, he is also a genius and I’m sure he never alleged that he had finished his bachelor’s. And he managed to survive his Ph.D. at Cal Tech just fine and is living happily ever after.
Of course, it may have helped that one of his best friends growing up was this guy.