I never pay much attention to what others are saying. Why would I care about their college experiences? Completely outside of my interests. Don’t people have enough on their own plate to care about others’ businesses?
I am not aware of publicly available databases of graduates of particular colleges. I know such services can be paid for.
I work in academia, and people have been fired, and the person that hired them suspended or fired, due to lying about degrees. However, HR was not allowed to tell why the person was fired (the last person dismissed was tenured, and was fired despite that), so they got a bigger and better job elsewhere, likely using the same lies.
My company subscribes to a service which does not cover each and every university in the world- so sometimes we need to actually talk to a human being (which is a pain) but it does cover a very high percentage- and it’s not that costly, and it is very, very quick if you have a social security number (i.e. the prospective employee has checked off a box that it’s ok to verify information, and has provided social, maiden name if relevant, any other name which he/she has used, etc.)
Worth every penny.
You can’t imagine the number of people who claim to be lawyers even though they have never graduated from law school and have never been admitted to the bar in any state in the US.
Falsely claiming degrees is sadly very common. Some schools have a file of people claiming degrees that they have been unable to verify. Princeton calls its file “Doubtful Princetonians.”
My favorite false degree story came from back in the 80s when a major department head in the company I worked for was fired for falsely claiming to have a PhD. Having a PhD was customary but not really required for the position, but he was fired for lying about it.
The way the lie was uncovered was he made the mistake of leaving his wife and running off with his young mistress. The angry wife knew where all the bodies were buried, so she called his boss at the company and blew the whistle about the non-PhD. He was confronted about it and continued to lie to his boss’s face, A check with the school (which should have been done back when he was first hired) confirmed the wife’s story, so he was fired for the lies.
The last time anyone saw him was a few years later. He was on TV - competing on the old “Newlywed Game” with his new young wife that he had run off with.
But in OP’s case, we don’t know what she is using.
My biggest employer verified everything, when I was hired (a long process.) But then would provide nothing more than confirmation someone was or had been employed there, not even the level, much less title or even the years.
Not being sure how these verifying processes work, I find it a little odd that someone is either paying out of their own pocket to verify coworkers’ (plural!) backgrounds for no other reason than being nosy, and is apparently investigating potential employers as well. If they are NOT paying out of pocket to play detective, then they are using their employer’s account to verify these people. That’s surely not related to their job, so it would seem that a person highly concerned with academic honesty is not as bothered by invasion of privacy or possibly misuse of company time or services.
It is easy to say you would never want to work for such a company if you found out the person interviewing you was not honest, and the potential co-workers aren’t either. But if you are in the position of needing a job, and the job market is tight, well, if you do have to accept then at least you know what you are getting yourself into.
I would advise you to contact ownership of the company, perhaps anonymously, to report it to them. They may well know already and don’t care. But your own integrity is something you should never compromise - make it known you won’t lie to protect the lies of others before you accept any position.
Educational background is the #1 exaggeration/lie on people’s resumes. Which is funny, since that’s probably the easiest thing to verify.
I interviewed (and gave my approval for hiring) a young woman who only spent 1 year at the big state U in her home state. Later, it became clear she presented herself as a graduate. I never said anything because she didn’t mis-represent her qualifications to get the job… only to her colleagues, most likely because she was embarrassed that unlike them, she did not graduate.
I attended business school (studying towards my MBA) but did not finish, as I became pregnant. I try to be very careful not to imply I have that degree. On my LinkedIn, it says something like “studied towards a degree in XYZ during ABC time frame.” But LinkedIn doesn’t really do a good job of distinguishing attended from attended-and-graduated.
Given the cost and effort to get a degree, lying about having one is pretty despicable and yes, may help further someone’s career in place of a more qualified candidate. I am not sure I would find an anonymous tip to HR particularly unethical, they can confirm or un-confirm the degree and take appropriate action. Spreading rumors or making innuendos without doing a proper check is very unethical.
Lying about anything on a job application, whether degrees, prior positions, prior salaries, etc can be grounds for immediate dismissal at any time, so is very, very unwise
Unless you can make 6 figures as an attorney without attending any school and have zero ethics aka are a sociopath.
I think you should do nothing. You can actually get in trouble for digging for personal info on your colleagues, esp while at work. HR may consider it an invasion of their privacy, and fire you for doing the searches.
It is HRs job to do this, or to subcontract it. If you work for a tiny place, just relay what you know to the boss and that is it.
Years ago a co worker of mine claimed to be a CPA which is a very dumb thing to lie about as it is easy to verify. (In fact if you knew my real name you could go to the Virginia State CPA website and verify that I am indeed a CPA).
However, by the time the person with the false claim left that company, he had been accused of harassing female employees and had stolen money from the company. The false CPA claim wasn’t the worst of this guy.
I think that lying in general is a character flaw, so what you’re describing about the harassment accusations does not surprise me. If your company had checked his background, he probably would have never been hired, the female employees never harassed, and the money never stolen.
FYI for people that want to know what I’m using to verify, I just googled the name of the school and they have a widget on the website where you enter their extremely basic information and it tells you the degree, when they earned it etc, of course if they’re not on there, it says “No records found” or something like that.
I think it’s all public information, I called my school and just said I want to verify the degree gave them my name, and they told me my degree, the major, minor, when I earned it, etc. They didn’t ask me anything, not even why I was asking. I could have said anybody’s name.
It is one of those things where people are going to think that it’s going too far, and that it’s none of my business, and I understand that, but it doesn’t change the fact that these people are lying.
Was this an H1-B visa hire?
The rationale being there were no American workers more qualified than this guy with the No Qualifications?
OP, my alma mater does not have a simple, easy to find link where one can input a person’s name and get their attendance history. And even if it did, you would have to know that name I was using at graduation, which is not the name I now have. I do not use my former name on any documents anywhere, other than in the government-mandated documents for my enhanced driver’s license. So chances are that if you used my current name, your snooping would return a “did not attend” result. Do you run checks on everyone you work with, or just the ones you suspect? I find what you’re doing creepy and unethical, and the fact that you’ve “found out” people doesn’t excuse your own overstepping. What if you’re wrong because someone has changed their name?
In that scenario, since I’m assuming that your current name doesn’t show up in your schools alumni database, then how would an employer verify your education should they choose to? I don’t think it’s customary for employers to ask for a social security #
@Trisherella I assumed that the incident with the false degree from “one of the prestigious India Institutes of Technology” happened in India, but I could be wrong.
@spellingbead, the schools that provide publicly-available databases, or even databases only available to their own alumni, often the alumni have to “opt-in” – so only those alumni who have agreed to allow their data to be available will show up.
Some employers (and licensing bodies!) verify educational information by requiring the employee (or prospective employee) to arrange for official transcripts to be sent directly from the institution(s) to the employer.
And lastly, of course it is customary for employers to ask for employees social security numbers! (maybe not prospective employees, but once you are hired, you will have to provide your SSN…). The verification process does not have to be complete before an offer of employment is made, rather the offer of employment can be made pending verfication – i.e., you’ve got the job, but if we find out anything in our background check, then the offer will be rescinded…
I don’t believe that FERPA allows an educational institution to give out that information without the consent of the individual. Employers most likely have to send a consent form with the request for the confirmation of attendance or transcripts. So I doubt any school has a public website that you can simply enter someone’s name and get a confirmation of attendance.
I used to be in charge of several entities and we hired quite a few people on an annual basis. If someone knew that one of our employees had lied about their education or certifications, I definitely would have wanted to know. I do not think that a person that is lying about their education is stopping there as they have been rewarded for lying by getting the job and probably are cutting corners elsewhere. HR would also have some explaining to do as to how we could prevent this from occurring again.
OP, I would send an anonymous letter to HR and wait several weeks to see if it were followed up, if not then go up the ladder over HR’s head.