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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.

In the US, the government is not directly implemented in the procedure of accreditation. Private agencies are taking care of this. The Education Department is recognizing some agencies. However, they do not do much to stop the activities from less honest ones. Several education institutes are not accredited due to the high procedure costs.

A report released by the department says a project called the Distance Education Demonstration Program has shown that waiving financial-aid restrictions on distance-education providers did not lead to any problems. The rules were designed to prevent fraudulent correspondence programs from gaining access to federal student-aid money. But the report leaves out details about one instance in which an institution closed down after it took advantage of a rule waiver and was then found to be riddled with fraud.

Nearly half of the medical-school faculty members who serve on boards charged with protecting volunteers in clinical research also serve as industry consultants, duals roles that raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest, according to a study published today in the journal Academic Medicine. The study found that 47% of the faculty members serving on university panels, also had consulted for industry within the past three years.

The Bush administration proposed guidelines last month that would let research institutions decide whether to restrict researchers' financial interests in studies involving human subjects, and whether such interests should be reported to the research volunteers.

A non-profit corporation that provides a high-speed computer network to colleges in New York State agreed last month to pay the federal government $1.4-million in a lawsuit alleging that it had misused a federal grant.