7.13.2003

Why Not To Buy A Degree (You Should Earn It Yourself)

1. You'll very likely get caught (the authenticity of your degree is too easy to check online or with a phone call).
2. It's the right thing to do.
3. There's no substitute for the real knowledge you get with a real degree.
4. In IT, experience is accepted as a genuine substitute for a degree.
5. They would rather hire someone with lots of experience in System Administration than some wet-behind-the-ears college grad who expects $60K to start and knows nothing.
6. There are few things that are going to get you snickered at faster than claiming you have a PhD, then sending out emails loaded with grammatical and spelling errors. (True story behind this one.)
7. Going back to school, even as an adult, is a terrific way to network into a better job.
8. You could meet cute, smart people if you go back to school.
9. Job Fairy techniques are all about self-defense, not offensive behaviors.
10. The Rules says not to lie - "it's a law of the universe".
11. If you get caught, you'll get fired. Job Fairy is all about not getting canned!
12. You don't want to have anything in your background that an enemy can use against you. Just as you wouldn't give away crucial personal details of your life at work, such as if you had been abused, you wouldn't want anyone to have something on you that they can use for leverage.
13. Human Resources professionals aren't usually technically savvy, but they are knowledgeable about this. And it doesn't take much to set off their sensitive antennae. What would you think if you saw this?
14. If you're using the Job Fairy template, questions about your educational background rarely come up anyway.
15. So many people went back to school after they were laid off because they couldn't find jobs. But now they can't finish because their money ran out, or they got tired of the effort and bought a little something from the ol' diploma mill. These people might have been your competition before, but now that awareness is raised on the issue, they won't be.
16. There is nothing like the prestige of a name brand degree. If you have a Bachelor's from Yale, and someone else has a Master's from Underwater Basketweaving University, who do you think they're going to pick?
17. People buy fake degrees in the hope it will enhance their resume. The Job Fairy resume template is all about keywords and coming up higher in the searches. Using the template will improve your chances more than the purchase of a bogus diploma.
18. You might get in over your head. You may think that the people who got those higher-paying jobs just schmoozed their way into them, or that you can do them, and you might be right. But what if those jobs require knowledge and education that even your experience didn't provide? You could make some bad decisions that have an impact even you could not forsee.
19. Depending on where you live, it could be a crime.
20. Click here to view a PDF file (4.6 MB) on how diploma mills work. You wouldn't want to be associated with practices like these.
21. There are public lists of illegal-to-use, unaccredited colleges. Click here to read a list of them (you'll have to scroll down to the middle of the page). If you buy one of these, they're already worthless when the company checks.
22. They're not legitimate, even if they advertise in well-respected media such as USA Today.
23. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
24. If you really have the life experience, then applying it in college will be a snap. You'll get a high GPA, and your teachers will adore you.
25. If you're strapped for time, you can do it online. Online education is just as real as in-person education. And you'll have something real to show for it afterwards.

Don't get busted by having fake credentials. If you tell the truth about your qualifications and your credentials, you will put yourself very far ahead of the others - just with this simple act. Lose credibility on one item, and you will lose credibility on all the others.

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