What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community | Hacker News Reader

What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Community

news.vice.com

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To summarize: contractors can bill the federal government at higher rates for PhDs, without respect to the origin or meaning of that degree, and pass on some of it to the employee, so these employees are getting PhDs in the most expedient way. The main difference between now and the 20th Century is the explosion of on-line schools and the expansion of the "national security community."

There has been a significant rise in advertising around the DC metro area for online schools. Usually the premise is the same: "get a degree|certification quickly in cyber-<insert field>|management". Degrees (not just PhDs), certifications, etc all equate to higher billable rates for the contractor. The contractor world is probably single-handedly keeping the certification industry afloat.

To be fair, when I travel outside the DC area I still see as many ads for for-profit schools. They're certainly a huge share of metro advertisements, probably the next down from weapons systems advertisements.

A lot of these schools have historically targeted US military personnel all around the US and even abroad due to the perception of 1. Ignorance 2. funding per Montgomery GI Bill or other entitlements for service members. It's part of why the University of Phoenix was recently banned from trying to recruit US Army (or another service branch) near bases / camps I suspect.

So (and I'm guessing here because I really can't stand to click on a Vice link) that a lot of those PhDs are in bullshit fields like "national security studies" or similar?

Vice runs vacuous clickbait sometimes, but they've gotten a LOT better in the last few years and they also do some excellent journalism now.

In particular, their feature-length documentaries are consistently amazing, as is Vice on HBO. Shane Smith and Thomas Morton both have balls of titanium. They go places ordinary journalists would never go, figuratively and literally.

Give them a second chance.

> Give them a second chance.

That is exactly what compulsive liars/sociopaths like Shane Smith want: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/03/vice-founder-famous-for-tr...

The documentaries and reporting produced by Vice are entertaining, but their standards of reporting basically make them a hipster tabloid.

A Couple of things....

1) The Daily Caller isn't exactly a noted truth teller itself 2) The author of that particular piece, Charles Johnson, is well known for being utterly without scruples whatsoever. He's also one of the purveyors of the extremely offensive "cuckservative" meme that popped up recently (hint: its white supremacist) which leads to #3... 3) Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here.

Also, to back up the parent, yes, Vice does run a great deal of clickbait, but they also run things noone else will. I've read younger authors who I discovered on more mainstream sites that have had pieces published at Vice.

It is not like that is the only report relating to Vice to raise suspicions:

https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/vice-media-kit-warning-...

http://gawker.com/working-at-vice-media-is-not-as-cool-as-it...

> Gavin Mcinnes, one of the founders, left Vice under not particularly friendly circumstances and has since come out as a white nationalist and he and Chuck Johnson are pretty tight online. Just some food for thought here.

You can tell a lot about a person from their cofounders. McInnes was at Vice from 1994 to 2007. Vice was built on shock journalism, McInnes never hid his racism and homophobia:

http://www.nypress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?avis=NP&date=20...

You're smearing someone while citing the notorious author that Politico dubbed a "misinformation monger."

Please stop wasting our time.

It seems worse than that from the article. A lot of PhDs are from non-accredited schools. Some of the PhDs are from a series of online "schools" that seem to be ran by the same man.

Reminds me of a lot of mid-00s Army officers that I remember- a lot of the OCS crowd especially had bullshit online degrees from degree mills.

Why would that be a motivation to get a PhD then?

I mean, for any billing issue, if you're contracting out a person with a non-accredited PhD then they do not have an accredited PhD and representing it that way is simply fraud; and from the side of customer/government asking for data on any "PhDs" including self-proclaimed, instead of accredited degrees would be simply ridiculous.

here's the relevant image: https://news-images.vice.com/images/2016/01/27/doctors-of-do...

the analysis is pretty straightforward from there.

What's the reason behind the rise of "business admin & mgmt"?

My guess would be that it is easier to bullshit a diploma in "business admin & mgmt" than in law, literature, or sciences for examples.

There is another axis that would be pretty interesting. I suspect that these "national security" types get a sizable and relatively automatic boost in pay for a PhD and it's likely not correlated to any performance or value.

Top Secret America by Dana Priest (http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-America-American-Security/d...) is a somewhat interesting read on it. There are some politically angled results you can take from it but one of the most obvious non-political results is that the national security apparatus employs people that tend to be better paid, live in better areas and have all those benefits (better schools for their kids, less crime, etc..) They also seem to be disproportionately white men. If you squint your eyes just right, it looks an awful lot like a jobs program for white men. The book is a few years old but as I remember it I want to say the average pay for a top secret cleared generic 'analyst' was in the $150k+ range, more if you're in a valuable specialty. Then the real kicker, most of them justify their own jobs and contracts, oversight consists of reading that justification, which I guess isn't totally unusual for government work but since they're contractors it's a little odd.. It's not performance based.

Why can't you stand to click on a vice link?

This is true in some other fields as well, such as K-12 education. The typical teacher contract guarantees an automatic salary bump for getting an advanced degree,

I don't understand. Do you imply that in the US any organization can grant a PhD to someone? And/or that there is no control over the requirements to meet to get a PhD?

> I don't understand. Do you imply that in the US any organization can grant a PhD to someone? And/or that there is no control over the requirements to meet to get a PhD?

In the US, the big distinction is between accredited schools and unaccredited schools. Probably any organization could grant a piece of paper called a "PhD" to someone, but not every organization could claim to be accredited by a legitimate accreditor.

My understanding is a lot of the online-only/for-profit schools are accreddited by less the rigorous "national" accreditors. The traditional regional accreditors are more focused on academics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_accreditation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation...

Okay, thanks!

"He adds that no one counseled him not to attend, and nobody has questioned his right to call himself a doctor."

This is the second or third article I've read (from Vice) on this subject, and there's never any discussion of the process of getting a PhD. You don't get one for taking classes, or for taking tests. If I can't find a copy of your dissertation and at least one published article, I'm very much going to question your doctorhood.

I admittedly do not know much about post-baccalaureate academia. If a non-accredited school in fact does offer a PhD simply for taking classes, can you call yourself doctor? What about a non-accredited school that still requires a dissertation but 99% of those submitted are approved? I am assuming that an accredited school handing out PhDs like this would lose their accreditation but maybe that's not the case.

I'm just not sure under what circumstances it's a legitimate decision to say "You may have a PhD but you're not really a doctor."

I'd say a majority of accredited schools also have very high dissertation acceptance rates. That is, you have been counseled by your adviser and other professors (a thesis committee) as to how things are going. They typically give you advice and want you to succeed.

Those that do not heed this advice do not get advised to turn in a dissertation.

This is correct. When I was a Ph.D student I was told that it was very rare for someone to fail their thesis defense, because their advisor will not let them defend until they know they are going to pass. It does happen, but it takes a special kind of effort and means your advisor screwed up.

One more amusing anecdote about "failing" a defence. I was told this happened in the EE department at Princeton.

There was a student whose defence wasn't going well and the committee’s consensus was that the more work needed to be done. But if the student actually failed the defence, special university regulations would kick in for the second defence which would likely make it impossible for him to defend.

Not wanting to do that, the committee came up with an ingenious loophole. Apparently the committee is allowed to take coffee breaks. So they decided to take a coffee break - for two months - while the student went back and fixed up his thesis and managed to defend once proceedings resumed after the "break."

That is absolutely phenomenal. Any sourcing on this, so when I repeat it it's not just a case of "somebody wrote this online"?

Oh, yeah. If you fail at your defense, your adviser is going to be permanently embarrassed. As in, not being able to show his face in the faculty lounge embarrassed. Universally mocked.

I personally had to go through the proposal phase twice and that was bad enough.

Duck and cover! Rant incoming! Remember: Face down, ass to the blast!

Here's a fun fact: Anyone can give out any degree they like. You can do it. I've done it; heck, I'm a Ph.D. granting institution. (And I thought the diploma turned out rather attractive.) But it'll be worth approximately the price of a piece of used printer paper.

A Ph.D. in particular consists of three different things:

* An academic degree awarded by an appropriate educational institution. This is the least important part. It's worth is dependant only on the reputation of the institution for excellence in the other two bits. Saying "I took classes for a PhD" is pretty meaningless---that has nothing to do with the other two facets, and in most well-regarded programs the classes are only there to provide background that you may have missed before getting into the program, for introducing you to the more advanced parts of the topic, and for introducing you to the faculty you may want on your committee. In fact, grades are seriously inflated. If you get less than a B, you must have done something pretty terrible to fail. Killing your professor's dog terrible. Saying "I wrote a dissertation for a PhD" is almost as bad. No one cares about the dissertation, other than that you have to write it. The only requirements from the institution are that it be formatted properly and turned in to the appropriate Dean's office before the deadline. (Something that most grad students fail at at least once.)

* A program of training for becoming a professor. You should be able to lecture without embarrassing yourself. You should be able to write an academic paper without embarrassing your co-authors. And you should be able to write grant proposals without embarrassing your employing institution. (These same set of skills are required for industrial research, in a modified form, as well as for academic jobs.) In practice, this is the most important facet, although in theory it should be second.

* And finally, the only part that really counts, although it is less important in current practice: Preparation for and a demonstration of the fact that you can conduct a successful research program that adds to the totality of human knowledge. This is what a PhD is.[1] A demonstration to whom, you may ask. (An excellent question!) You demonstrate your ability to a group of your new peers: other PhDs. Specifically, a group of faculty members and possibly other PhDs from outside the institution. Think of it like getting a black belt[2] or having a professional Go rating[3]: you get it for convincing others who already have it that you're worthy. How do you demonstrate it? You pick a topic with the aid of an advisor (more or less aid; there's many styles here), do the research working with your advisor and your committee (more or less (ahem)), produce papers describing the research, go to conferences, etc., and then write a dissertation describing your research program (that no one will ever read). Finally, you defend your research, somewhat like playing king-of-the-hill: your committee and other interested parties try to poke holes in you and your research in a public forum. That's it. When you convince them, you're done.

This is why I don't have a lot of sympathy with that Area 51 guy who said he has a PhD from MIT but that a government conspiracy is covering everything up. You cannot get through that last part without leaving many, many publicly visible footprints. Certainly not from MIT.

Likewise, you can get a PhD diploma from anyone, anywhere. But if you didn't go through that process, you may have a PhD but you don't have a PhD.

Note: I'm only familiar with the process in the US, and in STEM fields. But I think it's generally applicable. YMMV.

[1] http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

[2] It's been a long time since I practised any martial arts. Have some salt.

[3] Likewise.

Well said.

If you are a member of any research community you know very well who the relevant people are. And if you know your stuff you can find out within five minutes if the person across the table know theirs. Back then, we had hiring pipelines from university to the personnel department (it wasn't called Human Resources yet), no recruiters were involved, and scientific personnel was interviewed by scientists.

That said, it gets problematic when you attempt to set down procedures. At California community colleges, it seems, the candidates must have PhDs in the subjects that they are going to teach. That's fine. But no one can keep up with all the schools from faraway countries, some are legit, many others are not, and they have stopped trusting the interviewers to check if the candidate's PhD is legit.

So now every applicant has to prove degree equivalency. They don't know where Timbuktu is and pretend it's OK not to know where Paris is! You'd think the quality of candidates went down a few notches because anyone with a legit degree from a well-known school will be offended and refuse to spend money on the accreditated accreditator of degrees to be permitted just to apply.

You don't need a dissertation. At many universities, you can choose to publish a number of articles or write a dissertation, some do both.

You still generally write an intro & conclusion, give the book a name, etc.

I'm also intrigued, and seemingly let down, by folks with degrees in "Cyber {defense|analysis|warfare}". These degrees are always laid out on a resume with other super-sexy sounding credentials and accolades. Unfortunately, the interviews always seem to reveal a lot of (sometimes serious) technical gaps. The only reliable indicators I've come to find for technical and engineering acumen are curiosity and experience. These sexy sounding degrees are starting to become indicators of candidates that don't meet requirements.

Yes presumably this whole thing unravels when you interview someone and say 'oh great you have PhD - can you tell me about your top three peer-reviewed papers'

Assuming that you are permitted to unravel the ruse. If your company's purpose is to suck on the Federal teat, such actions are discouraged. Just look next door at the Theranos thread! For the better of ten years, asking hard questions about Theranos was discouraged.

There is a certain school in my area that offers a Masters in Cyber Security. We have come to learn through interviews that people with this degree know very little about practical security, reverse engineering, and exploitation. I'm sure it helps them get a sweet government job though.

Of course you don't need to know how to write shellcode, or have in-depth knowledge of anti-debugger reversing tricks, to write a very useful and robust security policy for an organisation, or manage a global incident response team. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the degree just because it doesn't teach 'practical' security. It's the same story with Computer Science degrees, which don't teach about source control or agile software methodologies, since these 'practical' subjects aren't really anything to do with CS.

This sounds like a problem with how contracts are written. They should be requiring that any degrees cited to fill contract qualification requirements come from an accredited university. That would at least take care of the worst cases. Some accredited schools with well known and prestigious names also operate diploma mills because they know large companies will pay for students to get advanced degrees.

In the wider sense I don't think this is a problem just in government though. Dubious and outright false credentials are a problem in industry too (ie: An HP CEO had to resign after it was found his advanced degree was fabricated.)

The bigger question maybe that if the person can perform at a certain level does it really matter what degree they have? At the same time dishonesty shouldn't be allowed just because the current system isn't ideal.

Sometimes the big name schools have an accredited ungraduate program, but an unaccredited masters/phd program.

I cannot find any information about accreditation at UT Austin (other than [1], which is out of date). I once had a discussion with someone from the academic staff of the CS department (name redacted to protect the guilty), which I may have misunderstood or be misremembering, but included a statement to the effect of, "we aren't accredited by anyone; they're all following us." (They did have an external visiting committee who reviewed and made comments on the curriculum.)

[1] https://cns.utexas.edu/undergraduate-education/academic-reco...

Back in the 90s I was working for a very large IT contractor on a very large federal government contract.

The place sucked, but that's another story. I started as a senior dev, and within a year or so moved up 3 or 4 levels.

Even after moving up, after a year I couldn't do that no more. I wanted to build stuff. When I told them I was going to leave, we worked out a deal: I'd pick a team of 2. We'd work on a project with a couple of other large government agencies. Folks would leave us alone. We'd get shit done.

So we did. In six months we delivered the project. I worked mostly from home. We 3 were delivering at a rate that was greater than the 10-20 person teams at the other agencies. It was sad.

After six months, I was getting ready to bail, but they beat me to the punch. They told me I could no longer be working at the job I was doing. Why? Because I was self-taught. Needed at least a Master's degree, preferably a PhD.

It really didn't bother me since I was leaving anyway. On the way out, though, I spoke to the number 3 guy on the contract. He asked me about a few of the PhDs I had working for me.

"They're pretty good, I guess. But this one guy? He's so arrogant nobody can work with him"

The guy basically told me that they had to fill seats with PhDs to meet the GSA schedule, didn't matter whether they did anything or not.

I liked all the people I worked with, but I'd never voluntarily go back to that kind of idiocy.

FWIW, this phenomenon is not a "US National Security Community" thing, it's a government thing (although quality control can vary).

I saw it in the Army -- enlisted Soliders get a certain number of "points" towards their promotions for completing coursework and obtaining a degree. So, they find the most expedient methods -- and for-profit schools that catered to this nonsense were all over. An entire platoon could literally pass around the same papers and get through an associate's degree together. "Criminal justice" was a popular one, for some reason.

I have lots of teachers in my family. They get a big pay bump for a Master's degree (had to be accredited, admittedly, so that's a little better). If the pay bump is the same no matter which school you go to, why not take the path of least resistance, especially when you're working full-time and raising a family? They all have online degrees from one of the local state colleges that caters to this market. I don't think they try to argue that they are better teachers for it. It's just a way to hustle for more money (and can you blame them?)

If you have to make a one-sized-fits-all rule about "this degree is worth this amount of money," you're going to run into these issues.

Can someone explain why "100% online" is used as a clear negative factor? What makes physical proximity to a whiteboard a better indicator of academic achievement?

The ability and willingness to have a family, a full-time job, and earn an advanced degree should not be a negative signal.

In principle there's nothing wrong with the concept of online degrees.

In practice, it's currently a complete cesspool of low-quality for-profit degree mills.

I would argue that MOOCs from top tier universities far, far exceed the average online for-profit in terms of quality of content. It's ironic, considering they're free. The caveat of course is you don't get a degree, though many have options for certifying you took the class.

In my opinion, a bullshit degree is worse than no degree. The person with no degree is relying purely on skills and experience. The person with the online degree meanwhile may be of questionable caliber.

I have sympathy for people who people attain online degrees out of necessity and are fully aware they're just getting a piece of paper to satsify whatever arbitrary bureaucratic requirements. For example, it's not uncommon for a minimum level of education to be retroactively forced upon already-competent employees. The questionable caliber part comes into play when you have people who fail to realize that their obviously poor-quality online school is, well, just that.

I think we're all familiar with the guy who acts like his University of Phoenix degree has launched him into the academic elite, and certain programs that are notoriously bad are and perhaps should remain a large negative signal.

But to that end I've heard multiple people in hiring positions whose opinion of Georgia Tech's CS program has diminished greatly because they now view them as "that school with the online Master's." I'm hope the net effect is negligible but I've heard too many people say that or agree with the sentiment to dismiss it entirely.

Ask around at any university. Some classes can be taken online. These are the classes the students throw on top of an already full schedule for free credits because they know they are complete bullshit and will take zero time and effort. If I had a M.S. from Georgia Tech and actually did a degree program with other students in a class and spoke with a professor many times a week and dedicated 1-2 years of full-time study and then my alma mater started giving out MY degree for people who sit in their pajamas and copy paste answers off the Internet I'd be pretty annoyed since the thing I worked so hard for/paid for would be devalued. I think being VERY skeptical of any online degree is quite wise and students should be required to say whether their degree was in person or online when, say, applying for a job, etc.

Online education might be a real thing one day but it's got miles and miles to go before anyone takes it seriously. Right now it's at the level of "there are pretty good lectures that you can listen to if you're curious about a topic".

As it turns out the reason most people don't do education and have a full-time job at the same time is that they are essentially incompatible. If you are dedicating enough resources to your job to not be fired, you are not taking your education seriously (unless your period of study far extends that of traditional students by many years). A serious degree program IS a full time job even if it's only a few hours of week of physical in-class time. Online is a way to cheat and pretend you can do both, when in reality you can't and one or both of them suffers a great deal.

I am enrolled in the Georgia Tech online computer science masters (OMSCS). The rigour and the grading is the same as for internal students for many classes. Some classes even posted comparison results for exams between online and internal students (results are very close in every statistical measure, even the number of failures is similar). There is a substantial workload required to pass courses and I have taken leave from work in order to complete assignments. Saying a masters is at least a dedicated full time job is delusional and out of whack with many students today. I worked the whole way through my undergrad because my parents were not wealthy and I needed to live in another city to go to university, I was not alone in this.

Cheating is cracked down upon and students have been expelled for collusion. Exams are proctored by humans or AIs (it is easy to do eye tracking and screen scraping, it even detected me trying to open the exam from a VM and refused to open). These (Georgia Tech's, MIT's, Standford's, etc) online programs are going to eat the middle out of the rest of the university sector as the content is substantially better than most midrange universities for a fraction of the price. You may be prejudiced against online programs for whatever reason but they are here to stay at the top end and the bottom end and it is important to be able to distinguish between the two.

I think the implication that you can get an online Master's from a reputable school (Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, MIT, etc) by "copy paste answers off the Internet" is pretty baseless. The posts on /r/OMSCS seem to point directly to the contrary at least.

The idea that being in a physical room and speaking to a professor in person makes you more worthy of a degree is simply not accurate. A degree should be a measure of academic ability, not a measure of physical proximity and willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time.

> willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time.

That is almost the definition of a degree. During a degree, every class expects you to devote time and resources to learning. The degree programs we see today are structured in such a way that they expect you to drop everything else and learn (or research, in graduate studies).

If you can't 'put your life on hold' in order to study you won't be able to do it quickly or coherently enough to generate the large body of knowledge that a degree represents.

The idea that "online classes" are the bullshit, easy-credit classes is false. When I was doing my undergrad years ago I took one class, statistics, online because of a scheduling conflict. The only way my experience differed from that of a person sitting in the classroom was how my lectures were delivered. Otherwise, it was the same homework, same quizzes, same exams, same everything. (The lectures were also the same, actually, having simply been recorded and put online a day or two later.) Moving your body to a particular physical location has a couple benefits, to be sure, and the trick to online education is to try to make that ground up. It's certainly not fatal to the educational process. Why would it be?

Nothing inherent.

But… Whiteboard schools are older and most of the currently higher reputation institutions are mostly physical. Many online-only schools are lower reputation, newer, or lower tier.

Also, if the school has a cynical business model of serving students interested entirely on the piece of paper saying they attended.

You could come up with similarly derogatory things to say about Pacific Island institutions, nigh schools, etc. It's a correlation not a causation.

I think there's also reality to the task of attaining what we think of as a valid Masters Degree of PHD. A family, and a full-time job are very demanding pursuits. I commend anyone who can achieve that kind of degree with those kinds of commitments. But, I also think it's suspicious when schools see their core offering as something suitable for a full time working family man to get a masters degree in 18 months in his spare time, especially if the area tends to subjectivity.

I did a Masters in Computer Science online from DePaul[1] and the teaching quality exceeded that of my undergrad time at UCLA where most Professors just read from the book to a hall of a few hundred people.

There are really two problems with the online programs. One, many low quality ones exists. As this article depicts, the government perpetuates this problems by treating a degree like a check box—doesn’t matter where the degree is from or what it is in, just that you have it, check! Two, peoples' perception of online degrees is damaged by the first point even though good programs exist.

Personally, I find the reliance on a piece of paper with words on it way over done by the civilian world. Certainly the government using them like a checkbox is too far in the other direction, but the inherent bias people give to big names schools in the States is pure snobbery. I've found the difference between good candidates from any school to be minimal, but go to some Silicon Valley companies and all you find is prestigious schools. Lazy hiring and self-selecting cultural fit.

[1]http://www.cdm.depaul.edu/academics/Pages/MSInComputerScienc...

I'd argue that it should. Like a BS, if you're not working on a PhD full time then it isn't hard enough to be valuable as either a signal or a learning experience.

So I just finished my MS in Bioinformatics at Johns Hopkins University and completed it 100% online. The program is meant for working professionals and there were also students taking classes both on-campus and online, and students taking all classes on-campus.

I'm on the job hunt now, really hoping people do not frown on the degree. However, I would still look curiously at someone who received a doctorate online.

You're probably in a great position in that your institution is very well known and well regarded, obviously not 100% online, and even the program is not 100% online. Unless you mention it or you've got concurrent employment several states away, it's unlikely anyone would know you completed it online.

I'm not saying online PhDs should be the norm, or even shouldn't be questioned, but doing something for 30 hours a week over 5 years at a computer shouldn't on its face be worthless compared to doing the same thing for 60 hours a week over 2.5 years in a school building.

How did you like the JHU program? I'm genuinely curious about the rigor and experience with the school.

I enjoyed the program for the most part. I come from a life sciences background and found the biology based courses to be slightly boring/review. The CS courses were definitely challenging for me, I only had minor programming experience in Python going in.

However, I would avoid doing it 100% online if possible. Courses that were review for me and/or did not require detailed discussion I would not mind taking online again. The harder courses are a different story, as well as courses that require extensive discussion. It is really difficult to troubleshoot complex problems over blackboard.

I was looking at the CS Masters program. I have a strong desire to acquire a foundation in information security. I was looking at their cybersecurity program as an adjunct to the CS program.

How was the actual administration of the program? I find that your experience with the administration can drastically alter your learning potential.

For undergraduate programs? Sure. For a Masters? I suppose. For both, what matters is the reputation of the school, really, not the online/physical dimension. For someone like Georgia Tech, they're the ones who are going to be badly hurt if they cheapen their online classes, so I'm reasonably sure that isn't going to happen.

Accreditation is an attempt to capture that reputation in a way that someone who has no idea about anything else can trust. Unfortunately, while you cannot game real reputation, gaming the accreditation is (almost intentionally) trivial.

A PhD, though, requires a lot of one-on-one time with a real faculty member. It's very much an apprenticeship sort of position. I've know people who did that remotely, and it's harder than doing it while being physically present. Getting a PhD while keeping a full time job is a very bad idea (I'm perfect evidence of this), and trying to do it 'online' is going to make that worse.

I'm bothered by the lack of labels on the y-axis of that graph. I don't hate Vice, but in my mind their credibility just went down a peg or two.

There are a lot of ways degrees can be bogus. With online education seemingly at the nexus of technology, timing, investor interest & consumer demand we're hearing a lot about it lately. Most astute commentators spend some time on the question of credentialing.

It's one of these weird issues where the new thing needs a good solution, but when you look at the old thing you see that it has a pretty terrible solution and that the problem might not be solvable.

I went to a well respected school. A pass in an arts degree "Arts Degree" (meaning humanities, mostly) at that school was basically available to anyone willing to show up, turn in 20k-30k words per semester (regardless of quality) and attend 3-4 tutorial per week without preparation. They just don't normally fail someone who completes the requirements, with a very liberal definition of that concept. It's not like math where you can either solve the problem in the exam or you can't. They accepted that subjectivity and left a large loophole wide open.

At the same time, very few students actually took advantage of that, with prior intent. Most of the learning opportunity was ungraded. There was 4-500 weekly pages of required reading on Kant, North African Medieval History, the history of ideas in cognitive psychology or high classical interpretations of the allegory of the cave. If you showed up at lectures, tutorials and discussions ready to discuss these materials every day you would probably experience learning that is unlikely to occur outside a university.

The mechanism for making sure you actually learn is always some degree of lax. That's within a University that has no interest, need or intent to exchange pieces of paper for money. Throw in globalization, an infinite number of institutions , the monetary incentives faced by bottom tier schools, etc and you have a big chunk of bogus degrees.

So… We can open the door and turn the lights on a lot of rooms with a lot of sordid activity. We'll get to see a lot of things we'd rather not see with knickers indignantly bunched up around ankles. I seriously doubt the "Intelligence Community" is unique in any way.

It's tricky shedding light on problems we don't know how to solve.

Skimmed article, not really getting the outrage. Since when do you need a "real" PhD to do the work described there?

If the issue is that the govt is obliged to pay the contractors higher for people with PhDs then, by all menas, let's complain. Otherwise this is just some pointless rending of clothes

I don't think the government is obliged to pay the contractors more for people with PhDs, but it does choose to.

This tracks well with a report I heard this week on declining mean salaries in the federal government versus industry. As the government pays less, has declining pensions, and is under constant threat of "shutdown" it isn't surprising that the best people would rather look elsewhere. That doesn't even factor in people choosing not to work for the government for political and moral reasons.

Sadly, this means that the bureaucracy will increase and become more petty. People will become more concerned about protecting their jobs and less about doing them well. Because, government work on a resume will become a "bad smell" making it hard for government workers to find a job in the private sector. Who wants to hire someone with a fake PhD? Only the government.

> VICE News accessed information about the educational backgrounds of more than 90,000 people who work in the national security domain and possess a Top Secret clearance.

That's the data from the OPM breach. Interesting.

I don't think so, I believe all this information is publicly available, though anonymized.

That's a pretty bold unsubstantiated claim you're making there.

It's purposefully exactly as bold and unsubstantiated as the claim vice makes.

Ah, crap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management... says 18-21.5 million. I was way off. :(

It's far more likely that many government contracts and departments have their team's qualifications on record due to government accountability guidelines. While it hasn't been proven who exactly grabbed the OPM data, the chances are pretty low that someone with the capability to undertake this sort of work would share the spoils with an organization like VICE.

When did Vice become a source of hard-hitting investigative journalism?

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