Speaker 1: More than half of the PhDs in the USA are fake. I can't believe it, if that is true of course, but I came across this. It's in a book that was published in 2012. It's called Degree Mills, the billion dollar industry that has sold over a million fake diplomas. It's this bit that really caught my eye, that the number of earned PhD degrees in the United States is between 40 and 45,000 each year, but the number of fake PhDs bought each year from diploma mills exceeds 50,000. That means more than half are fake. Why? Why do people want fake PhDs? Do they want to become this? This is peak PhD. There's obviously reasons. Well first of all, I think it's about standing out, right? So I went here and I had a look to see in these countries how many people have PhDs. These people want to become the top 1% or certain percentage of a certain country. It's an easy way to stand out. So here we are in Australia where I'm based at the moment. You can see that the average share of doctorate holders in the population is 1.3% and I think that's percent. So 1.3% of people have a PhD. In the States, 1.8% have a PhD and apparently half of those are fake. That's about average for everyone, 1.3%. So it's somewhere between 1% and 2% of people have a PhD. And they're obviously just getting them from fake places. But what really is a diploma mill? Why do they exist? Well, a diploma mill actually has a legal definition, something I didn't know before. And a diploma mill is somewhere that offers for a fee, degrees, diplomas or certificates that may be used to represent to the general public that the individual possessing such a degree, diploma or certificate has completed a program of post-secondary education or training. But in fact it requires the individual to complete little or no educational coursework to obtain such a degree. It is a legal definition but it means that this is being taken seriously. In my investigations I came across this dude on Twitter, or now X. He's a fake PhD investigator. He's been around since 2020. But essentially he looks for different PhDs, fraud from very high profile kind of people. So for example here, Conman and Chameleon, a fake PhD holder attempts to infiltrate German politics. Academia holds PhD dissertations in high regard and there are careful, well-funding and overlapping efforts to catalogue and preserve these dissertations. That makes PhD degrees inherently one of the most verifiable items about a person. But people are still faking them. There are more things, doxing the billionaires, chief technology officer with a fake PhD. This goes deep. And I was like thinking to myself, why do people fake PhDs? This is much bigger of an issue than I ever thought about. Sure, there's going to be some charlatans in there that, you know, just lie. But if the statistic of over half is to be believed, clearly there's something deeper going on. The first reason I think people are doing it is because it's easy. It's easy to join the 1%. Not many people are going to make it into the 1% with finances, money, prestige, all of that stuff. But if you can make it into a certain 1% just by paying money, that's great, isn't it? So I found this. You go on here, buy fake PhDs, and you get all of these different results. Buy a fake PhD, fake PhD, fake doctorate degrees, novelty, yeah, novelty. And then here, you click on them, you can choose your PhD, you can choose your fake doctorate, and here, discover our PhD diploma and transcript combo. The interesting thing to me is that you can put in any name of college or university. You've got the location, you've got student name, and all of the details. And then down here, the one thing I love about it is like, when do you want it? Just ship it. I'm in a hurry. I.e., I've lied to my employer and I need it as soon as possible. They're asking for my PhD certificate and I don't have it. Help. So clearly they know people could be panic buying these, and they've put it as an option. That to me is very funny. There's no doubt that having a PhD opens up doors for people. I know that there are certain circumstances where people just like need to put you in a box. If they want to meet someone in a professional situation, they need to know where you are in the hierarchy. And if you introduce yourself and go, hi, I'm Dr. Stapleton, sometimes I have felt like it just makes things so much easier to progress. They go, great, you're in this box in my mind. And having a PhD is a little bit of a shortcut to kind of like busting through those barriers with some people, especially if you're in a really technical environment. If people know you've got a PhD, then all of a sudden you're kind of like elevated in their mind. Check out this person on Reddit. They're saying like, what would happen if someone claimed to have a PhD and markets themselves as having such, but doesn't? Could they get in trouble for this? What could happen? Absolutely, you can get in trouble for that. There are loads of instances across the kind of the years of people finding out people don't have degrees, they lose their jobs, they lose their credibility. And it's really, really damaging to anything they do afterwards. But why do people do it? And I think part of it is like that stolen valour thing. You know those soldiers that pretend to have fought in wars and wear all their uniform? This is kind of like that, but for a PhD. Because if you just say, I've got a PhD, you kind of get respect from certain types of people in certain types of situations. And to be honest with you, sometimes that feels good. I did like it early on in my sort of like graduation just after where I was just like, I'm Dr. Stapleton and I would use it all the time. In fact, once my mum called me and said, Andrew, and I was like, Dr. Stapleton, thank you because I'm that sort of a person. But ultimately, you can get a little bit of a satisfaction from being a PhD holder in certain environments. So if it's so easily verifiable, why don't people check? I've actually got my own very story where if you go check out this video, I talk about how I submitted a fake PhD, you'll notice that people just don't really check properly, at least in the HR department at university. Sometimes there's just processes, they tick a box and move on. They're not expecting people to lie like I did, which was wrong, but I did it because I didn't like my job and I think I wanted to be fired. Anyway, that's in that video, go check out that one. But there is a way that you can check to see if someone actually has a PhD. What you do is you sit them down with a nice cup of tea. You look deep into their eyes and you say, tell me about your PhD. And if you don't see a swelling of sadness just behind the eyes and this kind of like trembling bottom lip or this kind of like five mile stare where they're just replaying the meetings with their supervisors and the rejections from the reviewers, they don't have a PhD. That's an easy check, isn't it? It's so easy to verify, in fact, that all you need to do in a lot of cases is reach out to a university and say, hey, I want to check in your archives for a certain PhD thesis. You can then often just get copies of that thesis and check it. The second thing you can do is just actually ask who their supervisors were and reach out and ask them, is this person a PhD graduate? I think having the actual thesis, which is very hard to, well, it's getting easier, I guess, with ChatGPT and stuff like that, but it was very hard to produce a thesis. But people are still lying about it because clearly it's easy enough to lie about it. Interesting. If you like this video, remember to go check out this one where I talk about the unethical use of AI that has been found in the peer-reviewed literature. Crazy. Go check it out. So there we have it. There's everything you need to know about the fake PhD crisis, I guess I can call it that. Over half in the US apparently are fake from diploma mills. I don't believe it. But let me know in the comments if you know someone with a fake PhD or you're suspicious of someone who's got a fake PhD. That would be interesting. And also remember there are more ways that you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewstapeton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description. And when you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks. Everything from the tools I've used, the podcasts I've been on, how to write the perfect abstract, the perfect daily schedule, and more. It's exclusive content available for free. So go sign up now. And also remember to go check out academiainsider.com. It's my project where I've got e-books, I've got resource packs, I've got courses coming. Can you believe it? I've also got a blog and a forum and everything is over there to make sure that academia works for you. All right then, I'll see you in the next video. Bye.