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Peggy O’Neill has seen her share of foreign diplomas.
After all, Bergen Community College in Paramus, N.J., where Ms. O’Neill is the international admissions counselor, receives applications from around three dozen countries every year. She looks through them all, checking whether each candidate has the equivalent of a high school education. But even Ms. O’Neill is sometimes stumped.
“Each educational system is different,” she said. “To be a high school graduate in Ecuador or Colombia you need a ‘bachillerato.’ In Albania, it’s called a ‘Deftese Pjekurie.’ Now, if somebody gives you a document that has that on the top of it, you say, “What the devil is this?’ ”
At such times, Ms. O’Neill calls World Education Services in New York City.
For $100, the company studies a set of credentials and writes a report detailing what classes the holder took, what grades he or she received, how many hours each course lasted, and whether the document is real and the school accredited. (Simple advice by phone, like that given to Ms. O’Neill, is often free to clients.) “They’ve been able to help and guide me,” she said. “They’ve been instrumental in a lot of our decisions.”
World Education Services is the largest company in a little-known field. Perhaps 80 companies nationwide evaluate educational credentials, producing about 175,000 reports yearly. Without them, the vast American export market in education would grind to a halt.
Empire State College, part of the State University of New York, sends all its international applications to an evaluator. That way, “we don’t have to have specialists on staff who know all the ins and outs of all these different countries,” said Beth Chiquoine, the college’s director of college assessment services. Harvard Business School sends the paperwork for all of its admitted foreign students – about 300 a year – through an evaluator for vetting.
Outside academia, evaluators are used by the Joint Commission on National Dental Examinations and even by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which lets applicants for certain visas submit evaluators’ reports to help prove they have the required education.
For a nonexpert, assessing foreign credentials can be startlingly difficult. A common trap for novice evaluators is the East-Central European degree called a “magister.” Often thought equivalent to an American master’s degree because of its name (literally, “master”), this is actually a lower-level degree akin to our bachelor’s. Another misleadingly named degree is Oxford’s “Master of Arts,” a worthless credential that the university, for obscure historical reasons, sends to every undergraduate seven years after matriculation.
When the evaluators are not helping admissions officers sidestep blunders, they spend their time on more involved research – figuring out, for example, what topics were covered in Physics 101 at the University of Baghdad, circa 1970. For use in such projects, World Education Services, like many evaluators, keeps a cache of sublimely obscure documents – crumbling Bangladeshi course syllabuses, out-of-date Indian course catalogs, long-obsolete encyclopedias. Some of these sit on shelves in the company’s library; many hundreds more are digitized on its servers, along with all the credentials ever submitted by clients.
Naturally, evaluators live in terror of fraud. On a recent morning, Mariam Assefa, the company’s Ethiopian-born chief executive officer, sat at her computer in a downtown Manhattan office and clicked through a database of British universities. The diploma mills were highlighted in red. “Sherwood, Stafford, Kingsfield, Knightsbridge, Harrington,” she read. “These are all names that we are supposed to assume are very British-sounding.” She snorted. “Right out of ‘Masterpiece Theater.’ ” Ms. Assefa keeps a file of fake degrees and letters of recommendation. One of her favorite letters, from a nonexistent Swiss institution, charmingly states that its subject “earned the accolades of our entire teaching staff.”
Then there are the forgeries.
Jim Frey, the president of Educational Credential Evaluators, a midsize Milwaukee-based evaluator, sees 30 to 40 fake or doctored credentials each month, he said, out of a yearly caseload of about 17,000. The source of these fakes is often instructive. Forged documents come from “everywhere there’s been civil strife,” Mr. Frey said -“Sudan, Iraq, Vietnam during the war.” Before the Iraq war, Iraqi immigrants often gave him bogus credentials. In many cases, those submitting fakes had earned the very degrees they were forging, but could not wrench them out of the Iraqi university system, which regarded those who had left the country as traitors.
But the leading sources of fraud are not necessarily war-torn countries or dictatorships. They tend rather to be states where the barriers to getting an education-or to getting your degree, once you’ve been educated – are high. Nigeria is near the top on anyone’s list.
“The government of Nigeria is fraud from bottom to top,” said Mr. Frey. “The system of checks and balances to prevent fraud is so cumbersome that it can take a student two years to get a legitimate document.” If a Nigerian gets a job offer abroad, Mr. Frey asked, “is he going to sit for two years and lose a job, and lose a chance to move with his family?”
In fact, the single experience most familiar to any evaluator is waiting for documents to arrive. “There are countries where we routinely send requests,” Ms. Assefa said, “and what do they do? They keep all the requests in a pile and they respond every six months. They say, ‘O.K., now we have a nice big pile.’ I suspect they think it’s an effective way of dealing with it.” She reflected. “Time is a different concept in these countries.”
Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.