Internationally, you can sometimes get asked for a look at your diplomas, or some verification thereof. It would depend somewhat on which area of the world you are in, what you’re being hired for / asked to verify, etc. There have been cases of manufacturing degrees from recognized American institutions, as they can be highly sought after. Those more recent global rankings do, in my experience, reflect an already-established impression that major American universities can represent a valuable distinction. I must politely add: my impression was that more often, the offenders weren’t American. This is not intended as a slight (either way), just my personal experience.
Due to the above, I sometimes traveled with xeroxes of my diplomas.
Companies can verify via National Student Clearinghouse. In fact, anyone can. You don’t need SS#. This is relevant for me because some friends and I are really livid that another mom who graduated from a regional college back east years ago (her long-time friends know it), has recently been claiming she has a degree from NYU. Now it seems she has a website that notes the NYU degree and a masters from Harvard! She lists no colleges on linkedIn and only her high school on FB. Give me a break! She’s one of those holier than thou folk, too.
About a month ago, someone ran her through the NSC system at their work: no degrees from, or enrollment in, either Harvard or NYU.
Misrepresentations are rampant.
NSC can also verify diplomas and tell if they are fake, BTW.
lindyk8’s post brings more examples to mind. Yes, there are misrepresentations here. Sometimes they even make the news.
I also recall a recent (in the last year or so), full-length news documentary on a major German radio station. There is apparently an acknowledged cottage industry over there, where paid “students” do the work necessary to write a dissertation, and possibly even do some testing, so others may receive doctoral degrees without actually doing the work. This situation arose because the advanced degree / doctorate is sometimes seen as a marker for generalized professional acceptance in German-speaking countries, rather than a specific, career track (e.g., here you may do a PhD in sociology to obtain a tenure-track position in a sociology department; there the doctorate can simply be viewed as a stepping stone qualification for career advancement in any number of professions). I do think there have been some prominent figures who were called out on this gambit; at least it is frowned upon, and the documentary was rather critical.
For a case where one is not outright lying, but being misleading, there was a thread a while ago about omission of a specific campus of a multicampus university (where some campuses have higher prestige and reputation than others) on one’s resume:
I work for a company that does background checks for big companies, you wouldn’t believe the lying we see on a daily basis. Lying about degres and high school diplomas, lying about their criminal past, their past employment, providing fake references…
This week we even had an applicant that called our company twice to provide references - too bad that we could see it was the applicant herself calling, because we saw her name on the phone display.
I think companies do a lot more checking now than they used to. I know my current employer checks people out.
Several years ago I worked with someone who claimed to be a CPA. Some co workers were suspicious and when they contacted the state CPA society there was no record of this person. The person was let go for other reasons.
@lindyk8: someone should anonymously send a note to your diploma faking acquaintance to say “we all know your degrees are fake. Drop the act.” Maybe it’ll tone down her superiority persona.
@anitram: that’s hilarious! An applicant to a background checking firm is applying with fake credentials! Is she nuts? Or maybe it’s a fake applicant from competitor? Hahaha
I am from the US but worked in Germany for a couple of years and you have to show your diploma as “proof” of your qualifications. Germans love their certificates!
Seeing all the posts about international requirements makes me wonder if I misremembered why my husband needed a copy of his diploma. Now I wonder if it may have been when he was transferred for a start-up overseas. There was a lot of paperwork searching for that, including our marriage license which I couldn’t find and one of our kids’ birth certificates that we had never even ordered. We went from enjoying a beach vacation to a receiving the offer phone call while there to having our lives thrown into a blender turned on high!
Now we have learned to be responsible adults and have important records neatly organized.
