You’ re busy filling out the application form for a position you really need; let’ s assume you once actually completed a couple of years of college work or even that you completed your degree. Isn’ t it tempting to lie just a little, to claim on the form that your diploma represents a Harvard degree? Or that you finished an extra couple of years back at State University?
More and more people are turning to utter deception like this to land their job or to move ahead in their careers, for personnel officers, like most Americans, value degrees from famous schools. A job applicant may have a good education anyway, but he or she assumes that chances of being hired are better with a diploma from a well-known university. Registrars at most well-known colleges say they deal with deceitful claims like these at the rate of about one per week.
Personnel officers do check up on degrees listed on application forms, then, If it turns out that an applicant is lying, most colleges are reluctant to accuse the applicant directly. One Ivy League school calls them “impostors” ; another refers to them as “special cases. ” One well-known West Coast school, in perhaps the most delicate phrase of all, says that these claims are made by “no such people. ”
To avoid outright lies, some job-seekers claim that they “attended” or “were associated with” a college or university. After carefully checking, a personnel officer may discover that “attending” means being dismissed after one semester. It may be that “being associated with” a college means that the job-seeker visited his younger brother for a football weekend. One school that keeps records of false claims says that the practice dates back at least to the turn of the century-that’ s when they began keeping records, anyhow.
If you don’ t want to lie or even stretch the truth, there are companies that will sell you a phony diploma. One company, with offices in New York and on the West Coast, will put your name on a diploma from any number of nonexistent colleges. The price begins at around twenty dollars for a diploma from “Smoot State University. ” The prices increase rapidly for a degree from the “University of Purdue. ” As there is no Smoot State and the real school in Indiana is properly called Purdue University, the prices seem rather high for one sheet of paper.