For anyone who’s ever wondered why it seems administration employees are inept, there appears to be a perfectly logical explanation: too many of these officials were never educated in their respective fields. Instead of getting degrees in their alleged areas of expertise, they were buying them diploma mills.
They are safety engineers at nuclear power plants and biological weapons experts. They work at NATO headquarters, at the Pentagon and at nearly every other federal agency. And, as CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, they’re employees with degrees from phony schools.
“These degrees aren’t worth the paper that they’re printed on,” says one insider, who asked CBS News to protect his identity.
The man worked at a so-called diploma mill where students pay a lot of money to get a degree online or through the mail for little or no work.
He says he’s not surprised to know that there are people working at almost every level of government who have degrees from these types of operations.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles Abell has a master’s from Columbus University, a diploma mill Louisiana shut down. Deputy Assistant Secretary Patricia Walker lists among her degrees, a bachelor’s from Pacific Western, a diploma mill banned in Oregon and under investigation in Hawaii.
CBS News requested interviews with both officials. The Pentagon turned us down, saying, “We don’t consider it an issue.”
This is a controversy rife with problems.
First, in many states, using a phony degree to get a government job is against the law.
Second, it’s not exactly comforting to think that some officials have been given weighty responsibilities without formal academic training.
Alan Contreras cracks down on diploma mills for Oregon, a state that’s taken the lead on this issue.
“You don’t want somebody with a fake degree working in Homeland Security,” says Contreras. “You don’t want somebody with a fake degree teaching your children or designing your bridges.”
But we found employees with diploma mill degrees at the new Transportation Security Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Departments of Treasury and Education.
And finally, as Matt Yglesias noted, there’s the small matter of basic honesty.
Of course, if this administration is going to start making dishonesty a disqualifying factor for office they’re going to wind up needing to fire an awful lot of people. Still, you might think the president would find it a bit troubling that the man in charge of our personnel and readiness issues in the military doesn’t hold a real degree in, as his biography states, “Human Resource Management.”
Post script: Any time the issue of diploma mills comes up, I immediately think of this hilarious article Gene Weingarten wrote on the subject a few years ago. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Weingarten gets a degree in “outer space physics” from “Brentwick University.” It’s a riot.