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People in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have been found buying fake degrees of all sorts from diploma mills and other bogus universities. Those universities have no physical existence and operate only through websites. Most diploma mills are operating from Britain or United States where academic standards are presumed to be very high. Recently, the Federal Bureau of Investigations compiled a list of over 10,000 persons who obtained fake degrees from diploma mills in USA. A significant number of them are from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. Currently, there are about 80 notorious diploma mills that operate from the United States and the UK.

Nichols and Berliner demonstrate that high-stakes testing is wrong—intellectually, morally, and practically. Not only will it "not work" to improve education, it is already doing demonstrable harm. Bringing together many press accounts of the negative impact of high stakes testing, Nichols and Berliner provide convincing argument that the punitive measures accompanying this testing is destroying America's greatest invention, its public schools.

According to Stossel there is a financial corruption going on in American schools. He claims that there is a myth that the education system needs more money. US spend more on schooling than the vast majority of countries that obtain better results in the international tests. But the bureaucrats still blame school failure on lack of funds, and demand more money.

Oregon lawmakers have passed a bill requiring those seeking employment in the state to add a disclaimer on their résumé to any qualifications not issued by an institution of higher education accredited by a state recognized accrediting agency. This is part of an on-going struggle by state legislators against institutions of education where academic standards are insufficient or non-existent. The Office of Degree Authorization lists on its Web site more than 300 institutions which is not recognized.

The Department of Education has launched a website which features a list of 6,900 academic institutions accredited by an accrediting agency or state approval agency. The website is designed to help employers distinguish between accredited institutions of higher education and unaccredited institutions commonly as "diploma mills" that offer bogus degrees.

A federal grand jury in Kansas indicted a former college-basketball coach last month on charges that he arranged for his players to receive phony academic credit and stole $120,000 in Pell Grants. The former coach faces a total of 51 years in prison and over $1.5-million in fines if found guilty of all counts.

An online university that supposedly granted a graduate degree in business to a pet cat was sued Monday for consumer fraud by the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office.

La Salle University, a religious degree-granting correspondence university, was shut down by the FBI for issuing falsely accredited degree in 1996. Due to the fraud, the students were notified personally or through advertisements that they could receive restitution from the over $ 10 million seized from La Salle. However, due to a bad computer system it is still possible that some students were left out.

Diploma-mill owners are an elusive bunch. They flood e-mail boxes with offers of cheap college degrees, and collect payment through Web sites, then filter that money into overseas bank accounts. When the police try to shut one of the businesses down, the owners just set up shop elsewhere, often in a poor country with weak fraud laws. Unable to snuff out these illegal businesses, many states have changed their strategy: if you can't catch the dealers, go after the consumers. A handful, like Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey, have recently criminalized the use of fake degrees.