3 Weird Ways to Get a PhD
From uncredible to incredible: what you get, costs, and equity.
1. Buy a PhD
What you get
You can buy a PhD online and receive your certificate within a couple of weeks. You could frame it, hang it on the wall and call yourself Doctor backed by a piece of paper. Your certificate could fool prospective employers or clients into thinking you have a PhD. One scheme claims to input you into the student records of a reputable UK university which can be verified by an external credentialing service. Menus covers the full range of fake student needs and tastes, including student ID, library card, a never-expiring university email log-in and even a cap and gown with the right colours.
Costs
While prices range from £35 to £3000+, the real cost is identity theft or credit card fraud — providers will need your government approved official photo ID to make your certificate, your address to send it to, your date of birth and your credit card details. If the provider is in the business of selling junk PhD certificates, later down the line you could get caught. Perhaps the most terrifying costs are from those who fake medical degrees and ‘practise’ causing permanent harm to others. Depending on your conscience, you will suffer from varying degrees of anguish caused by living a lie. Though buying a PhD is not illegal in the UK, using a fake qualification to get a job is fraud and carries a 10-year prison sentence…. enough time to study for a BA, Masters, and a PhD.
Credibility 0 or 1/5
Most certificates are unlikely to stand up to close scrutiny but verification by World Education Services (WES) would give major credibility. US employers may request people educated in non-US education institutions to provide a WES report, which is supposed to:
Identify and describe your credentials
Verify that your credentials are authentic
May include a grade point average (GPA) equivalency
Includes an evaluation of the authenticity of your documents https://www.wes.org/about-wes-credential-evaluation/
One buy-a-PhD provider claims that they have an insider at a UK university who will electronically send the transcripts to WES upon request. Since this university is already a partner of WES, if the claims are true, you can buy an un-credible accredited PhD.
2. Outsource your PhD work
Paying someone else to do your work for you is not new but the internet has made it much easier for students to access these services. Various names exist for this form of academic dishonesty include outsourcing, delegation, or contract cheating.
What you get
A smorgasbord of services are available covering all subjects, needs, and budgets. You can break down your PhD into its components and pay someone to do each part and if that sounds like too much work, hire a project manager. You’ll fulfil your degree requirements, the evidence of learning physically exists and you’ll own it even if you didn’t do it yourself. If you take charge of coordinating a team of researchers, writers, and editors, and manage your budget while maintaining the quality and timeliness of outputs, you’ll have gained the skills of a competent manager. You(r team) might make a significant contribution to scholarly work in your chosen field.
Costs
To acquire you’re PhD this way, you’ll first need to get into a university, which of course, is a service you can pay for. To apply for a Doctorate in Education, £785 will get you a list of five prospective “algorithmically matched” supervisors spread across several universities and a “comprehensive university application package” including a 1,750-word PhD proposal (you pick your title from a choice of three), personal statement (based on a short questionnaire), CV, letters of reference and cover letter. Once accepted, you’ll have to pay the university fees, which might be doubled if you don’t come from round here.
Once you’re in, you’ll have to complete whatever assignments are required which often culminate in a thesis. £4200 will get you a 75000-word thesis in 30-days or £7350 for the day after tomorrow. You might get your thesis for as cheap as £750 if your writer is in Pakistan. It’s difficult for faculty untrained in contract cheating to detect it. While most universities are getting to grips with plagiarism using academic honesty policies and software, they still rely on the integrity of their students to sign off their work as their own.
Credibility 3.5/5
It is not uncommon for universities to expect professors to delegate much of the research and writing to their research students… if a PhD student does it with their own money, is that cheating? This route gets a high credibility score because the evidence of learning and contribution to knowledge exists and “you” complete all the requirements to graduate.
3. PhD by Publication
What you get
In this route, you complete research and get published in peer reviewed journals. You tailor your research and learning experience to your own needs. You submit your portfolio together with a 500–10,000 word document (depending on university) describing how it forms a cohesive whole and contributes original knowledge to the field. Where collaborative research is included, you define the scope of participation by collaborators. You can slice the intimidating monster-thesis into more manageable chunks and build your peer-reviewed publications before getting the PhD. You’ll get excellent training in dealing with rejection and journal editors. Work is assessed in ways similar to a normal PhD and often include an oral defence. If the examiners fail you, you may be able to try again after a certain time-frame. Some universities only allow this route to people who are or were formerly affiliated with the institution.
Costs
Is it because they’re relatively cheap that PhDs by publication are rarely advertised? During the process, you won’t be charged extra fees if you take longer than originally planned because you apply and pay fees after you’ve done the work. Universities often charge one year’s full-time tuition fees and require you to be registered with them for between 6–18 months. If you apply for a PhD by publication at Warwick University (UK) and work there, they’ll reduce your fees by 80%. Theoretically you can get a job in their maintenance department and pay £865. Cambridge University allows only their own graduates to apply for PhD “by special regulation”. If the degree committee believe that the work submitted does not constitute prima facie a qualification for the degree, £396 of the £462 application fee will be returned. Depending on the university, the oral examination fee might cost extra.
Credibility 5/5
You have to be self-motivated, determined, and resilient to gain a PhD by publication. If publications and citations are what makes academic work significant, it can be argued that a PhD by publication is more credible than a traditional research Doctorate, whose thesis may never be seen beyond the department. With this being such a little known route, it’s possible that prospective employers or clients may question the integrity of this qualification but it is recognised by the UK Quality Code for Higher Education:
4.18.6 Higher doctorates may be awarded in recognition of a substantial body of original research undertaken over the course of many years. Typically a portfolio of work that has been previously published in a peer-refereed context is submitted for assessment. Most degree awarding bodies restrict candidacy to graduates or their own academic staff of several years’ standing. https://www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/quality-code/qualifications-frameworks.pdf
Tailwinds and Cheating
Where does help end and cheating begin? Consider the following three scenarios:
- An English graduate asks their university-educated sister to proofread and edit post-graduate application documents for a UK university
- A Japanese graduate asks their university-educated English friend to proofread and edit post-graduate application documents for a UK university
- A Japanese graduate pays a university-educated native-English writer online to proofread and edit post-graduate application documents for a UK university
In which scenario(s), if any, is the applicant gaining an unfair advantage? Is it unfair that people with a university-educated family member gain an advantage in the application process? Is it dishonest to ask for help? Is it fair to non-native English speakers that 18 of the top 20 universities worldwide are in the UK and the US when English is the third largest language by number of native speakers? Is it dishonest to ask for foreign language help? Is there a qualitative difference between a Japanese graduate getting foreign language help from a university-educated English friend and them paying for that service from someone online? Is it dishonest to pay for foreign language help?
No simple line can be drawn between getting help and cheating.
One provider states that their business
was born out of my own frustrations: the inability to find adequate support during my doctorate. With little-to-no direction, I found it difficult to understand how to structure my studies, resulting in reams of unnecessary research and chapters of redundant information. We have therefore tailored our services to help students with all aspects of their PhD, from the initial proposal to the final viva presentation.
Many post-graduates will identify with this because academia largely favours professors who focus on research and publishing papers, not those who teach well and offer compassionate guidance. Whereas in years gone by, getting extra support might have been limited to parents or friends, the internet has democratised availability of academic support to anyone with internet access.
… And money.
Is inequity in education and society fuelling inequity? While someone from a more financially-secure context can afford to make up for a lack of academic support, a single-parent student might not be able to. Native English speakers benefit from the unnoticed tailwind of working and researching in their first language. Providers of fake PhDs target people who lack time, don’t have the money to study, or are unable to move countries for higher education. A brief scratch on the surface leads to a rabbit warren where credibility can be bought by those who can afford it — the higher the fee, the lesser chance you’ll get caught. Is (higher) education providing sufficient academic training and support to those from less financially secure environments, to people in families not educated beyond high school, to students whose first language is not English?
PhD by publication is a relatively cheap, authentic way to learn, research, contribute significantly to knowledge in your field and get a PhD. Why is this path so less traveled? Peer-review publications and impact (citations) are currently the main ways the significance of academic work is measured. I don’t know whether universities in non-native English speaking counties offer this route and if they do, their researchers would still face the challenges of publishing in a foreign language or be limited to the range of peer-reviewed publications available in their field or. Whether or not the rest of the world would accept the credibility of PhD by publication in non-English institutions is another unknown.
Normally in my articles I provide references to sources of information. For this article, I have chosen not to give publicity to providers of services of questionable integrity or fraudulent operations. The research was based on findings through searching google with terms like ‘buy a PhD’ and ‘write my PhD thesis’.
