Dear Editor,
Guyana, the petrostate is like a honey pot attracting good worker bees, but undesirables like wasps. Now, it seems it has become the “Klondike gold rush” for online degrees, including the prized PhD. One Jerry Jailall, raised the issue in SN Letters to the Editor, May 15, “GOAL must raise its operational bar as part of good accountability and also protect students’ academic work”. He argued nothing’s wrong placing the “doctor thingy” in front of your name, or put as many letters behind your name — as long as they are legit.
The “legit” is what’s causing immense grief in Guyana. So: hear me out for this simple proposal to overcome the famous Caveat Emptor (buyer beware, or buyer’s remorse) problem.
First, set up the equivalent of a credit bureau for all diplomas and degrees. The agency could be a licensed private firm, or the government like the Ministry of Education. Let’s make the big assumption that both have integrity. The agency would collect and store information about a holder’s credentials, including published papers in reputable journals and books, and makes this information available to employers or potential employers. A private firm would, of course, charge a fee.
Second, the submitted diplomas and degrees will be rated like publicly traded companies. And this is how we solve the integrity problem surrounding GOAL. The agency will thoroughly vet the credentials based on legitimate and verifiable information:
Name and address of the institution of higher learning;
Date of enrollment and graduation;
Copies of official transcripts showing the subjects and the grades (the diploma/degree holder provides same the rating agency); and
Title of master’s or doctorate thesis that are in various repositories including libraries, national archives, and university archives. Say, you wrote in your glorious resume that your PhD dissertation at McGill University was titled, “Transforming Lead into Gold: The Theory and Process”. Anyone can verify the information by accessing McGill University’s archive.
The agency that verifies the authenticity will assign the letter “L”, denoting the credential is “legitimate”. The employer, or potential employer, can then look it up in the agency’s database. The nice thing about this is that if you plagiarise, you’d be caught out. Not good at all. And if you do not indicate the “L” in your representation, you’d be asked to provide, which becomes a powerful incentive to not cheat!
Hope this helps, or Guyana will have the dubious distinction for being the country in the world with the highest number of PhDs per capita, or the highest number of graduate degrees per capita.
Sincerely,
Terence M. Yhip
