Printing second-rate MBA degrees

A degree mill is a school that grinds out people into graduates with pieces of paper. The focus is on how many pieces of paper they issue. The process is not as important as the end goal. An MBA mill is any college, university or institute that has the earning and issuing of MBA degrees as its core value; and there are not hundreds but thousands of them spread all over the country.

Some of these mills are scams posing as legitimate schools, taking money in exchange for a worthless degree. Some of them are actual colleges or universities that offer degrees, but with no accreditation and no real academic experience. Still others are colleges or universities, more interested in money than in quality education, which is essentially selling degrees.

Many MBA degree mills depend on universities that issue degrees for a price, but without academic rigour or evidence of actual student learning. There are also degree mills that make things quite hard for students. They add rules and academic hoops. They might have challenging tests. They require papers and projects. They might even offer good and valuable learning experiences. Yet, in the end, they or the students they serve see them mainly as steps toward getting that coveted piece of paper called the MBA degree, at the end.

Scan advertisements, off-line and online, and you will read grand promises of earning your degree which gets you jobs through campus placements. There is a drive to get jobs, thereby removing time for education, reflection and deeper learning. Unfortunately, even the top-rated MBA schools do not talk about what they teach or what the students could expect to learn. They are all promising high paying jobs and a cushy life as the end. There are ads that place a prominent image of a student in an academic robe, crossing the stage with the degree in hand, since that is the goal in a degree mill.

The paper, on which the degree is printed, is not without value. Companies value it when hiring. Certain pieces of paper from colleges are required to even apply to some jobs. The paper adds some level of prestige. It serves as a signal of achievement and progress in a person’s life. Recipients and their families often beam with pride. This paper however is quite fraudulent. The degrees are being granted by State Technical Universities but the deliverance of so called education is by private parties whose purpose is sustainability of student enrolments and profits. Purely of illustrative purposes, one example for the discerning is Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow - most MBA degrees have an essential requirement of a project report based on summer internship (like a dissertation) to be submitted, evaluated along with a viva-voce exam.

The exam is conducted by a nominee examiner of the Technical University along with internal staff of the delivery college. The nominee examiner is a faculty member from another college which is also the affiliate of the same University. No one can estimate but informed-guesses from worthy and well meaning faculty members have pointed out that nearly the entire project reports are plagiarised from old ones, downloaded from websites like slide-share and scribd. There are paid services online for writing dissertations. The owners of the delivery college bring undue pressure upon examiners to ignore such blatant academic fraud. No one wants to rock the boat of corruption since each stakeholder has a mean self-interest in the process and has a personal axe to grind as a participant. This malpractice is spread right from the colleges in Agra and Greater Noida in the west of its jurisdiction to Varanasi and Gorakhpur in extreme east. Similar voices murmuring identical wrong doings are heard from other technical universities in the country.

In the flurry of higher education innovation today, with its growing praise of massive enrolments, we would be wise to not lose sight of the dangers associated with becoming a degree printing mill. Such mills are devaluing the essence of great higher education by churning out certified to have been educated but incompetent to be employed graduates. Additionally, the more colleges see themselves as mainly selling verification and degrees, the more that they set themselves up for disruption. Things might go well for them in the short- to mid-term, but that will change.

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