I enjoy poking around diploma mills. Especially the ones that spam my inbox. Like Kennedy-Western University, which describes itself like so:

Since 1984 Kennedy-Western University (KWU) has provided distance and online degree programs to over 30,000 students. KWU is one of the largest non-accredited online universities in the United States. …

Ah, the magic word: “non-accredited”. Translation: “Bogus”.

But hey, being non-accredited can’t be all bad, right? After all, KWU seems to be proud of the fact that it isn’t accredited.

Read on:

Three of four of its faculty of 140 credentialed professors – who are simultaneously employed by major traditional universities throughout the country – hold Ph.D. degrees from accredited universities.

Oops, they’re undermining their own statement. Isn’t it kind of suspicious that they are bragging that their faculty is so good, they got their degrees from real universities (unlike this one)?

My personal favorite diploma mill is Harrington University. It’s fun kicking off a Google search to see how many people put a degree from that institution on their résumé.

If you scroll down a bit on this Swedish web page, you’ll find a picture of the building that houses so-called Brentwick University. The photo caption reads,

Brentwick University claims to be on 196 High Street in northern London. This is what it looks like. On the second floor, over the dry cleaner’s, lies Cordon Bell Accomodation Agency, a firm which serves as a maildrop and forwards mail on behalf of a series of camera-shy companies, among them “Brentwick University”.

It’s a somewhat regular scandal in the United States that somebody well-known will be exposed to have been claiming a degree that was obtained by dubious means.