When John Barone was hired as superintendent of the Milton Town School District in January 2011, school officials were so wowed by his credentials that he was the only one of 18 applicants interviewed by the school board. As board member Jim Lyons told the Milton Independent at the time of Barone’s hiring, “I think he’s just what our town needs.”*
What set Barone head and shoulders above the other candidates for the job? It may have been his 20-plus years of educational work experience, including five years as principal of Colchester Middle School and three as assistant superintendent at Barre Supervisory Union.
The academic degrees Barone cited on his résumé probably helped, too. They included bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Castleton State College and a doctorate in educational administration — summa cum laude, no less — from Woodfield University.
Evidently, no one on the school board or 15-member search committee bothered to vet Barone’s academic accomplishments. If they had, they might have discovered that Woodfield University isn’t accredited by any agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. In fact, the Better Business Bureau gives Woodfield University an F rating based on 16 factors, including 48 complaints filed against the business, 34 of which are still outstanding with the consumer watchdog agency.
Woodfield University gets an even worse evaluation from GetEducated.com, an Essex Junction-based company that ranks and rates more than 3,800 online college degree programs based on their affordability and credibility. GetEducated.com describes Woodfield as a “degree mill,” or a phony university that sells college degrees and transcripts rather than a legitimate education. Like most degree and diploma mills, Woodfield offers instant credentials online and over the phone with no prerequisites other than a valid credit card and claims of “life experience.”
GetEducated.com was founded in 1989 by CEO Vicky Phillips. A psychologist and career counselor by training, Phillips designed and directed the first online counseling center for adult distance learners for AOL/Electronic University Network.
At the time Phillips launched her business, few Americans owned personal computers, took online classes or had even heard of the internet. Only three online MBA programs existed. Today, her company tracks 397 of them in the U.S. alone.
When asked about Woodfield University, Phillips says it “doesn’t ring a bell,” though she isn’t surprised. As she points out, there are now hundreds, if not thousands, of degree mills plying their trade on the internet. The demand for fake academic credentials has exploded in recent years, she says, fueled in part by the global recession, highly competitive job markets and double-digit inflation in higher-ed costs, which have outpaced even those of health care.
“Educational fraud is a billion-dollar-a-year industry worldwide,” Phillips says. “It is huge, because having educational credentials controls your life earnings and, increasingly, your job mobility and entry into professions.”
According to GetEducated.com’s diploma mill police” — the site’s second-most-popular link after its “best online colleges” recommendations — Woodfield is one of 20 known degree mills operated by the Organization for Global Learning Education, owned by Pakistani businessman Salem Kureshi. In August 2012, a U.S. district court in Michigan ordered Kureshi and his codefendants to pay $22.7 million in damages to settle federal racketeering charges for selling more than 30,000 fake college degrees and high school equivalency diplomas.
When reached by phone, Barone doesn’t deny that he obtained his doctorate from Woodfield. But he claims it took him at least three years of work in his spare time, taking online courses, submitting “tons of writing” and assembling his research portfolio, then defending it via Skype. That said, Barone admits he received “some course credit” for his years of employment as an educator.
In the past month, Barone has removed any reference to Woodfield University (though not to the doctorate itself) from the school district’s website, owing to what he calls “a falling out” with the company.
“I have since learned that … they have become nothing more than a diploma mill, where they’re just randomly handing out diplomas left and right,” he says. “As soon as I found that out, I told them that I don’t want to be associated with a fraudulent university.”
It should be noted that Barone’s other degrees, from Castleton State, are legitimate.
Barone isn’t the first Vermont official found to have a degree of dubious distinction. As the Valley News reported in October 2006, Joe Anthony of Chelsea, an Orange County assistant judge, claimed to hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminal justice management from Hamilton College. In fact, Anthony obtained his degrees from Hamilton University of Wyoming, a notorious diploma mill investigated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office for selling phony degrees to federal employees.
A search of LinkedIn, the business-oriented online social network, turns up at least 130 other people who tout degrees from Woodfield University. They include the president and CEO of an aerospace engineering firm in Orlando, Fla.; a fire protection designer in Columbus, Ohio; a submarine engineer in the United Arab Emirates; and a psychologist in Omaha, Neb., “specializing in anxiety, panic attacks and agoraphobia.”
Phillips says it’s incredibly easy for professionals to burnish their résumés or curricula vitae online because, as she discovered, most degree mills don’t even verify the education or employment backgrounds on which their clients’ degrees are purportedly based.
In June 2009, Phillips obtained a master’s of business administration from Rochville University for Chester Ludlow — her pug dog. Phillips simply typed him up a résumé that claimed Chester had graduated from St. Johnsbury Academy and had life experience as a “food taster.” About a week after Phillips paid his tuition, Chester received his MBA via express mail from the United Arab Emirates. Rochville even included a card with a toll-free number that potential employers could call to “verify” Chester’s degree, coursework and GPA.
“He has a transcript and a diploma that looks better than mine, with a gold seal,” Phillips says. “He did great in finance, but I never saw him crack a book.”
Phillips notes that about 40 percent of the calls and emails GetEducated.com receives about degree mills come from people who want to know whether they can be arrested or fired for obtaining such a degree. Many inquire which mills have the most realistic-sounding credentials, so they won’t get caught. In other words, she says, such degree seekers often know they’re doing something unethical, if not illegal, and do it anyway.
Phillips, whose staff members survey, rank and rate online degree programs based on objective measurements such as cost, reputation and student satisfaction, says that any institution that offers course credit and grades based on life experience is immediately suspect. She acknowledges that a few legitimate schools, including Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey and Charter Oak State College in Connecticut, help older adults document their careers and military experience for academic purposes. But she emphasizes that those schools are accredited by recognized agencies — not faux-accreditation mills owned and operated by the degree mill itself.
Woodfield University claims its online degrees are accredited by the “renowned” Universal Accreditation Agency for Online Education, but the UAAOE is not listed on the U.S. Department of Education’s website of recognized accrediting agencies.
In fact, bogus accreditation is just one component of the degree mills’ increasingly sophisticated scams. Contacted recently by this reporter, Woodfield University offered for sale not just the same doctorate as Barone’s but nine other supporting documents. They included two transcripts, four “verification letters,” one “certificate of distinction,” one “certificate of membership,” one “award of excellence” and — on my request — a summa cum laude-qualifying 3.8 GPA. All of these materials were offered without any request to verify the caller’s (my) academic credentials or past employment.
A company rep said that the degree would arrive within 15 days after Woodfield received its payment of a $750 “doctorate degree fee,” plus an additional “attestation fee” of $549. (No degree was purchased or received.) The rep also noted that a copy of the doctorate would be sent to the U.S. Department of State to be “endorsed” for overseas employment.
“This is all part of the scam,” Phillips explains. Because these businesses can’t claim legitimate accreditations, she says, they typically use other, official-sounding words such as “certification,” “endorsement,” “notarization” and “authentication” to make them appear credible. As she puts it, “It’s the classic shell game: ‘Look over here!'”
The scams are so lucrative, she adds, because in most states, including Vermont, it’s legal to cite academic credentials that don’t come from a legitimately accredited institution. Granted, in Vermont, school superintendents aren’t required to hold a doctorate — and Barone emphasizes that he didn’t use his to qualify for his superintendent’s license.
What does the Milton Town School Board say about Barone’s dubious degree? Board chair Mary Knight says board members first learned of it back in April, when a local attorney representing a disgruntled former employee brought the issue to their attention. According to Knight, once Barone explained his experiences with Woodfield, “We were satisfied with his response.
“We felt he was qualified, and still feel he’s qualified,” she adds, “so that’s as far as it’s gone.” Knight does admit, however, that the board never asked to see Barone’s dissertation or research portfolio.
“I don’t feel like I did anything wrong,” Barone says. “I worked with this college, sent them a large amount of money and submitted the work. I feel like I earned the degree.
“Having said that,” he adds, “I’m a licensed superintendent with a doctorate hanging on the wall from an unaccredited institution … Maybe somebody learns from my experience.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “BA or Total BS?”
*Correction 09/04/14: An earlier version of this story stated Milton Town School Superintendent John Barone was the only one of 18 candidates interviewed by the 15-member search committee. In fact, he was the only candidate interviewed by the Milton Town School Board.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2014.
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Barone, said that he worked with this University when they were legit. Did you do anything do disprove this, or did you just set out to smear someone’s name without evidence? I notice you did not mention the names of the other professionals with the dubious degrees
What is the purpose of this article? To educate people on diploma mills or discredit John Barone. As a person who was on his hiring committee, his doctorate did not play at all into why I wanted him as the superintendent. It was his experience as a principal of a middle school, his expertise in curriculum ( a weakness in Milton) and that he had classroom experience.
I feel strongly that seven days went after this story to increase the discrediting of Milton that has been happening lately. . I thought seven days was better than that.
How about the issue that whether he is qualified or not, what sort of person has the type of ethics to purchase a fake degree? To me that is more problematic than the issue of whether he deserves the job based on his academic credentials. I find it difficult to believe that the online university was legitimate when he bought the degree, and then in the intervening years became illegitimate. The news coming out of Milton has been horrifying and my heart goes out to the children that have been damaged. Instead of blaming Seven Days or the media for reporting all these scandals, how about using your energy to help improve Milton? It may be a good idea to investigate the background of people at the top, if he purchased his degree to burnish his CV, would you want someone like that managing any school? If he apologized and did some community service, it would help show that you can make a mistake, but take responsibility and do the right thing when the mistake comes to light. He doesn’t need to be run out of town.
To “wasiewas1”: I did NOT write this article to “increase the discrediting of Milton.” To my knowledge, Seven Days has written no articles that discredit the town, or its school officials. I chanced upon this story while researching GetEducated.com, an Essex, VT company that evaluates the worthiness, or lack thereof, of online degree programs. In the process, I learned that an educator in Milton claimed, on a taxpayer-funded website, a doctorate from an unaccredited online degree mill specifically discredited by GetEducated as bogus. In the reporting process, I gave John Barone ample space to explain himself, and even gave him the last word in the article.
To “Kate Stout,”: Neither did I “set out to smear someone’s name without evidence.” I explained what Woodfield University is, and is not, and provided plenty of evidence of what two reputable consumer protection agencies have to say about it. I also described in detail how this particular business, and its owners, have been pursued by government prosecutors for violating federal racketeering laws, for selling fake and useless diplomas and degrees, to more than 30,000 people. I also showed how easy it is for anyone to obtain such a degree — without doing any work but opening one’s wallet.
As for naming other professionals with dubious degrees from Woodfield, I found none in Vermont. However, anyone with access to the Internet can readily visit LinkedIn.com, enter “Woodfield University” in its search engine, and find the names of 130 other “professionals” who claim degrees from this same institution.
I felt the article was well written, and an excellent example of fine journalism. Information was presented to represent both sides of the issue. Barone was quoted with his explanation of the situation, with no discrediting follow-up by the writer. As a reader, I felt that I was presented fair information, and felt comfortable coming to a conclusion based on the information I read. I am horrified that the school board did not bother to interview several candidates for a position of such great importance and influence in the lives of children. I think the school board and hiring committee should be held responsible for negligence, and Barone’s claimed work thoroughly reviewed, as well as the “university’s” reputation at the time of the granted degree. As a parent and an educator myself, I would not be comfortable assuming he obtained the degree legitimately. I would demand documentation. If there was a chance he obtained it unethically, he should be removed. This is not the kind of example we want for our children.
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