Forget about Kansas State University. Forget about the University of Missouri. Kansas University students have other lesser-known, more dangerous rivals to worry about.

They’re diploma mills with names like Columbia State University, Kensington University and Monticello University. And their numbers are growing, fueled by the popularity of the Internet.

These for-profit businesses basically sell “degrees” ranging from undergraduate degrees to doctorates with little to no academic work required.

“This industry is engaging in fraud — period,” said David Shulenburger, Kansas University’s provost.

Its victims include employers who get duped by the worthless degrees and college graduates who spend their time and money to get a degree.

“It unquestionably does damage to people who get a legitimate degree and then have to compete for jobs or promotions with people who have one of these bogus degrees,” Shulenburger said.

Degrees for sale

Allen Ezell, a former FBI special agent who ran a task force aimed at shutting down fraudulent universities, said a congressional study in 1985 estimated 500,000 people had a phony degree.

“Today, I think if you said 1 million Americans have a phony degree, the number would be way too small,” Ezell said.

The dubious degrees come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some companies will offer people a degree as soon as their credit card clears.

“It takes about a minute-and-a-half to become qualified,” Ezell said. “They’ll ask you whether you want a degree with honors or without. It is like ordering a sandwich with or without mayo.”

Others require that the customer take a few classes, usually over the Internet or by correspondence. A master’s degree or doctorate may take two to three months and require that a thesis or dissertation be written.

Many of the schools justify the shorter learning time by saying they’re giving applicants credit for their previous work experience, said John Bear, a California-based author who writes books about legitimate online universities.

Bear said prices for the degrees ranged from a low of $10, offered by some church groups, to more than $5,000. He said the average was usually about $2,000.

For those who don’t have the ambition to even get a fake degree, Bear said, there are a growing number of Internet companies offering counterfeit diplomas and transcripts for sale.

Bear said he bought a “very nice” replica of a Harvard College medical diploma for $39.95. He said it was a perfect example of how dangerous the fake degree industry can be.

“I ask people if they know where their family physician earned his degree,” Bear said. “Most don’t, and even if they do, they’ve never verified it. I show them my Harvard medical degree and say maybe he has one of these. That usually causes their eyebrows to raise.”

Checking it out

The industry is creating problems for legitimate universities. Universities that have chosen to offer more courses over the Internet have struggled to convince wary consumers that they’re not part of the diploma mill industry.

“I hear a lot of people say they are uncomfortable with any online degree because of all these matchbook degrees,” Bear said.

In nearby Franklin County, Ottawa University struggles with the issue. The school has about 9,000 students with the vast majority of them taking classes far from the school’s Ottawa campus.

In the 1980s the school began offering classes in the Pacific Rim of Asia. The problem there is severe, said John E. Neal, Ottawa university president.

“There are a lot of people who don’t have an understanding of how the American education system works,” Neal said. “They’ll send a ton of money and they think they’ve gotten a real diploma. We run across that constantly.”

In the states, Neal said the industry created issues as well.

“Somebody walks into our Milwaukee office and they say ‘we’ve never heard of Ottawa. Convince me that you are a legitimate institution,'” Neal said.

At KU, Shulenburger said the worthless and counterfeit degrees put extra pressure on the university registrar’s office to ensure that transfer students aren’t using phony credentials to enter KU.

“It takes extra work but you have to do it,” Shulenburger said. “It is our business to do that.”

Getting tough

Getting caught using a fake degree, either on a resume or to get into college, is a criminal offense in some states. In Oregon, the offense is a Class B misdemeanor and carries a fine of $1,000 per offense or up to one year in jail, said Alan Contreras, administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization.

He said the office generally issued a warning on the first offense.

“Do you want your bridges designed by engineers with fake degrees?” Contreras asked when explaining why the state has the law. “We view this as really a very fundamental question about whether we as a society value education.”

Kansas does not have a similar law, but Bear said the state did receive high marks for having stringent laws that made it difficult for the businesses to use the state as a base of operations.

Other states that have laws similar to Oregon’s include New Jersey, North Dakota and Indiana. Ezell praised the laws, equating them to the strategy of punishing both the drug dealer and the drug user, but said more needed to be done.

The FBI task force that he led was discontinued in 1991 when he left the agency. Since then the Internet has allowed the industry to grow from about a dozen diploma mills to an estimated 300.

“There is no concerted effort on the part of any law enforcement agency to do anything about it,” Ezell said. “It is white-collar crime. There’s no blood drippings, no guns, no drugs, no violence. It takes a back seat to everything else, especially after 9-11.”

In Oregon, Contreras’ office has tried to wage a publicity battle against the industry. The office maintains a Web site that lists approximately 200 schools that the state believes to be diploma mills or issuers of dubious degrees.

Changing mindset

Some of the schools on the Oregon list argue they aren’t diploma mills but are the victim of narrow thinking about how a university should operate.

An admission’s counselor at Lacrosse University said the school offered a good value to its students who can earn a master’s degree in business administration by taking nine correspondence classes and paying approximately $2,500.

“We’re not a diploma mill,” said Jennifer, an admission’s counselor who would not give her last name. “I promise you that you’ll walk away from here learning something. If you want to get something out of our classes, you will. That’s the way it works with any class.”

The Board of Regents of Louisiana apparently disagreed. The board refused to renew the license for the school to operate in the state. It simply moved its headquarters to Mississippi.

Contreras, though, doesn’t just blame the schools and the knowing customers that use them. He said society and its workplace culture deserved some of the blame.

“There’s tremendous pressure out there to have a degree,” Contreras said. “There are many jobs you’ll never get a promotion if you don’t have a degree.

“The main problem, I think, is that we’re requiring college degrees in situations where we shouldn’t be. We have gotten into a culture where if you don’t have a college degree, many employers consider you worthless. That is just nonsense.”