College Degrees for Sale

Time was when it was taken as an article of faith that American education was the best in the world, envied by everyone else. A degree by any U.S. college or university was something akin to the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" or imprimatur in the intellectual world. This was based not only on the supposed superiority of the learning experience there, but also on the high ethical standards to which they adhered to. While degrees from numerous other countries were never held in such high regard and were always suspect because they could be bought, the ones awarded in the USA were above suspicion.

Well, not really.

Take the recent case of a university in North Dakota, where they have found out that it awarded hundreds of degrees to Chinese and Russian students without them having completed their studies in one of those international programs. Apparently, the university had quite a few of those programs with different countries and was making a lot of money off them, so no one was really checking if the students were actually completing their credits toward graduation. This is the kind of thing that Third-World countries have been accused of traditionally. So, it seems that the U.S. has joined the ranks of the "banana republics" in education.

Who knew?

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