According to HEDD, the official University degree checking service in the UK, a third of people applying for jobs falsify important information on their CV, 40% exaggerate their qualifications, and 11% falsify their degree altogether. It would appear that very similar figures apply all around the World. However, there are also the other critical factors to consider as a potential employer. Even if a degree appears genuine there are other things to consider, such as the credentials of the awarding body, the grade of degree awarded, and whether the holder of the degree is as intelligent as their qualification seems to indicate.
Setting aside the huge number of fake universities that exist around the world, many otherwise bona fide institutions are ranked low by institutional quality-monitoring bodies – and for good reason. The institution’s accreditation can also be with the lowest common denominator body. Their degrees are real enough, but largely worthless. Take, for instance, the lowly ranked USW in the UK. It has been forced to cut staff numbers to deal with its low intake of students, and an attempt in 2015 to open up a centre in London was reported to have generated no takers for its courses there.
Generally, private universities are poorer quality than public institutions and frequently offer a poor return to students for the high fees they tend to charge. However, going to one of the leading Universities is no guarantee of graduate quality. Many Universities regard international students as lucrative cash generators and apply very lax standards to a student’s assessments – to the point that they can have extremely low language skills in the country of their studies, but still obtain top honours.
Neither is a University education a guarantee that a student will graduate with meaningful skills or up-to-date knowledge. Even the best Universities do not update their course materials in a rigorous way each year, nor do they have any true objective tests about the quality of their academic staff. The quality control that does take place usually consists of form-filling and one academic from one institution assessing another institution. The fact that those graduating from the world’s leading institutions get the top jobs is less to do with course content and much more to do with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Economic graduates are assumed to be the best if they graduate from LSE and therefore doors are opened for them. The fact that a working- class genius who had been endlessly discouraged from studies by their family ended up in a third-rate University will escape all but the wisest employer.
So, what is the best way out from this quagmire for employers? The answer is not to tighten up the interview process, as interviews are notorious for producing misjudged outcomes. The first thing is to check to see if claimed qualifications exist. Most large employers already do this. They use such services as NSC in the States, Auradata in Canada, or CHSI in China. Then the next thing is to require all candidates to take a company’s own battery of tests to determine their general intelligence level, personality profile, language abilities, and know-how in the fields most relevant to their potential job. Moreover, when hiring business graduates, also check if degrees are awarded from business schools listed by the three leading international accreditation bodies – AMBA, EQUIS, and AACSB.
There is much still to be said for the standard non-verbal IQ test and old-style PF16. Both sort out the real starters for any professional position. General knowledge assessments also reveal that by far the majority of even well-qualified candidates cannot answer the most obvious questions about the World – like “name one of the two longest rivers in Africa”, “What happened in zero BC – or get anywhere near to that other obvious gem “In what year did man first land on the moon?”. One candidate with a UK Masters degree in Law from a good University who applied for a job with FedEE recently stated with a straight face “I think a man first landed around 1920”.