What are degree mills? Degree mills are colleges that take money, normally about two thousand dollars, from prospective students and give them credit for something called a life experience. In exchange, students receive a realistic looking college degree. Unfortunately, these degrees are worthless to most of the students. It is also the reason some employers are reluctant to hire students who have received online degrees.
Degree mills are hardly a new creation. For as long as people have been earning college degrees, degree mills have been willing to hand them out to anyone who had the money. For a one-time low price of fifty dollars, you could have a genuine Harvard Law degree printed while you watched.
There are several easy ways to make sure that you don't fall into the degree mill trap.
The first thing to be aware of are colleges offering a low one-time entry cost. Although it is true that online colleges normally offer a lower tuition thantraditional colleges, they still are by no means cheap. If a college offers a degree for less than twenty thousand dollars, be sure to check their credentials very carefully.
The other thing to be on the lookout for are online colleges and universities that offer huge amounts of credit for life experience. Schools offer credit for life experience because they realize that it is an important part of your overall education, but they also realize that it isn’t everything. The most reputable schools will offer is about twenty-five percent of the overall degree credit, not one hundred percent.
The third thing to watch for is the length of time it takes to receive a degree. If a college promises a degree in less time then it took you to fill out the application, it probably isn’t going to be a legitimate degree.
The people who are running the degree mills are smooth. They know how to talk and they know how to make themselves sound perfectly legitimate and respectable. The good natured people on the other side of the telephone are very good at convincing potential students that everything is on the up and up. A lot of times the students who mail in their checks don’t even realize that their degrees aren’t the real deal until they try to use them to advance their career or to get into another college program.
