Important advice for academic job-seekers at all levels.

Sadly, government jobs are rarely vetted, which is why there is so large a market for bogus degrees. In terms of return on investment, a $100 degree may return $1,000,000 in excess earnings.

I ask myself, "why, why, why, why" and the only thing I can come up with is that a LOT more people get away with this than ever get caught.

second, I conclude that this is in part a result of the certification culture in which one's credentials play such a critical role, trumping what one can actually accomplish. Thus the flourishing of dodgy degrees referred to by CRM-114 or just plain faking as in the OP

Deja vu?
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/27/mit
"Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a national leader in the admissions reform movement, resigned after the university confirmed that she had claimed academic degrees she never earned, MIT announced Thursday." Written April 2007

Clearly, someone forgot to sue the (claimed) granting institution for telling the potential employer about their dishonesty - obviously an amateur here.

I'm going to guess that employers don't check often, and the liars are figuring they can either con people or perform well enough that noone will actually want to check. This is particularly amusing (OK, not really) when companies are background checking low-end service workers through external vendors who may have flawed data with limited correction ability (see BusinessWeek, early August?). So, while you can get blackballed from Starbucks because of a false claim by an employer, you can get hired by MIT while lying on your resume (to get a job paying fourfold? higher wages). That seems fair.

For my most recent academic position, I was required to request an official transcript from graduate school to be submitted to the university attesting to the fact I earned a PhD.

Go with talent and integrity over talent and pretend credentials.

Heh. Uncredentialed talent and integrity are never in demand. No credentials, no job. Period.

We set up a situation where only people 6' and above can get jobs, and then condemn short people for being dishonest for wearing shoe lifts.

Also be careful who you make these claims in front of.

Back in the early 1990's Telstra (Australian telco) hired an American Chief Technology Officer who claimed to have a PhD and almost never failed to brag about it in front of staff. He did it once too often.

One day he went to talk to a large bunch of researchers at the company's research labs to explain why a fair number of them were to be retrenched. Many of those people had genuine PhD's and were a bit miffed by his bragging, so they checked (this was the early days of the internet prior to commercialisation and they were some of the few with internet access. They also had direct links and logins to the US research networks).

It took them about 2 hours to discover that he did not have a PhD and to uncover his real academic record (which wasn't too bad, but no PhD).

He was fired the next day.

Which was a shame because he was very good at the job.

Disclaimer: I owned shares in Telstra at the time and still do.

Interesting that the first university on the list of places she's taught (U of Iowa) is the same institution from which she claimed to have received two degrees. Assuming the department handled most of the interview process, at that she was teaching in the same department in which she supposedly got degrees, was there no one in that department who was there for some of the ~six years it would have taken to earn those degrees and thought it a bit odd to not remember having seen her around?

This one is less obvious: never fail to mention a degree that you do have. People leave, for example, the PhD out of their CV when applying for a non-PhD job, and sincerely don't think they're doing anything wrong. But companies will fire them no-questions-asked if they find out.

We set up a situation where only people 6' and above can get jobs, and then condemn short people for being dishonest for wearing shoe lifts.

That seems like a bad analogy - I can't change how tall I am but I can change what degrees I have. Lots of people actually worked hard to get those things (and not all of whom did so by having connections or family in the right places), and it seems more than a little unfair to screw them over in favor of people simply dishonest enough to claim to have them.

The irony, of course, is that the subject didn't need the nonexistent degree to get her job - her skills could have won it for her. George O'Brien (?) wasn't going to be Notre Dame's football coach because of the degree he didn't have, but because he had proven he could win football games, and the degree was unlikely have been the reason he got into a position to win football games in the first place. These people got to their positions on merit, which implies that credentials aren't necessary or determinant of final position - if you can perform well enough the credentials aren't necessary. Lying about them, however, is a showstopper. Creating a system where the best liar gets the job seems like a poor method to generate productive output.

People leave, for example, the PhD out of their CV when applying for a non-PhD job, and sincerely don't think they're doing anything wrong. But companies will fire them no-questions-asked if they find out.

What kind of job explicitly requires that you do not possess a PhD if you don't mind me asking?

I thought some PhD chemists hid their degrees because PhD jobs in pharmaceutical chemistry are generally less available than MS/BS level jobs, and companies won't hire a PhD for those jobs because they figure that either you'll be unhappy and leave soon, you'll want to be promoted to your education level ASAP, or you'll expect higher pay at the front end than for a standard MS/BS holder.

I haven't actually applied for these jobs (and don't work there), so I can't be authoritative, but I thought that there was a substantial break between the duties of BS/MS chemists at drug companies and those of PhD chemists, and that PhDs were not hired for lower level jobs. I think (but don't have the reference) that In The Pipeline has a post about a PhD masquerading as an MS subsequently fired for it (though that could have been for the dishonesty rather than the positional constraints).

We were hiring a high-up administrator. The search committee visited the campuses of the finalists and interviewed around for background. We hired someone who, according to campus associates, had a number of wonderful characteristics. It turned out that the person was just the opposite; and the search commitee had encountered the big, well-coordinated lie. The search committee eventually figured out what had happened, and was abashed and apalled. Some years later, I made connections (through an ebaY sale) with one of the liars, and had the story confirmed. They were willing to do almost anything to get the person off campus.