Fake Diplomas Made In Karachi And Sold Globally: Declan Walsh's story in The New York Times

Scamming Education Seekers And Also Enabling Crooked Employees Seek Promotions

In a story in The New York Times, May 17, 2015, Declan Walsh describes the plight of Mohan, a 39 year old migrant from India working as an accountant in Abu Dhabi. Mohan took on debt of $30,000 to pay local agents of Axact for a fake MBA degree and later, fearing he will be deported, other useless certifications. The article notes, "He had stopped sending money to his parents in India, and hid his worries from his wife, who had just given birth.”

Axact sells a range of fake qualifications from high school diplomas for $350 to doctoral degrees for $4,000 and more, through a team of aggressive sales folk. Walsh writes that the company, based in Karachi, Pakistan and run by Shoaib Ahmed Shaikh, misuses a CNN logo and creates false LinkedIn profiles for its fictitious faculty.

The article adds, .. "very little in this virtual academic realm, appearing to span at least 370 websites, is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company."

While some like Mohan are eager to secure higher education to advance their careers, others apparently know the diplomas are fake but buy them to advance in their careers. As the article notes, "In the Middle East, Axact has sold aeronautical degrees to airline employees, and medical degrees to hospital workers. One nurse at a large hospital in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, admitted to spending $60,000 on an Axact-issued medical degree to secure a promotion."

For full story go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/world/asia/fake-diplomas-real-cash-pakistani-company-axact-reaps-millions-columbiana-barkley.html?_r=0

Atul Gawande on Speeding up Major Medical Innovations that Spread Slowly. Common Sense Solutions.

Eradication of Cholera by a mixture of sugar, salt and water.

Atul Gawande is the most influential physician in public policy debates in the US today, at least in the media through his articles and books, most of whom have been best sellers.

In a piece in the current New Yorker, link below, he probes why certain major medical innovations like anesthesia spread rapidly while other equally major ones like anti-septic did not.  


Atul Gawande: How do you speed innovations that spread slowly? New Yorker July 29, 2013


Gawande's interest in public policy is not surprising considering he also has an MA in Philosophy,  Politics and Economics, the famed tripos program at Oxford University. For more information on him:

Atul Gawande

Brave Peter Buffett attacks the Charitable Industrial Complex

Peter Buffett on Philanthropic Colonialism and Conscience Laundering by the Wealthy.

Peter Buffett, son of Warren Buffett the third richest man in the World, raises major issues about charities  which, as he notes, is "an old story."


He writes, in The New York Times, see link below,  "Inside any important philanthropy meeting.... heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders .. are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left... (While) inequality is continually rising..... (B)etween 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed."

He adds, "As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few..... (“conscience laundering” involves feeling) better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. ....as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine."


Peter Buffet says charitable intervention cannot solve the issues of providing clean water, access to health products and free markets, better education and safer living conditions. "It can only kick the can down the road."

He implies that billions of dollars of charitable giving is thus being wasted, including by his dad Warren Buffett as well as Bill Gates, head of the Gates foundation which handles the bulk of Warren Buffett's philanthropic giving. Also in criticizing market based methods of measuring charitable impact, like return on investment, is Peter Buffett's attacking the Gates foundation, which uses similar measures?

So what then is the role of charities like the one Peter Buffett heads? He has no answers but writes, "It’s time for a new operating system.... something built from the ground up. New code." This lack of solutions is likely to be the focus of counter attacks on him by the charitable food chain, arguing  that "New code" sounds naive while the charities are at least tackling specific problems however imperfectly.  

Best wishes to Peter Buffett for bravely pointing out the conscience laundering factories. Wonder if the impact of his arguments will be more than cocktail chatter at upcoming fund raising galas, which are the core of social life for many involved in the charitable industrial complex.

His sister Susan A. Buffett runs The Sherwood Foundation, which got its name from the Sherwood forest in Nottinghamshire, England the hiding place of the legendary Robin Hood and his group.

Peter Buffett: The Charitable Industrial Complex

Indian Professionals in the US ought to repay India the true cost of their Indian education.

Indian professionals in the US ought to at least repay the US Cost of the Free Education Gotten in India. 

Indian professionals who migrated to the US, as well as other parts of the World, owe their success in large part to the education they got in India which was heavily subsidized by government funding.
At a minimum, in the interest of fairness to the hundreds of millions of Indians who were not as fortunate, the migrating professionals owe India, through donations in kind or in time to Indian philanthropies, the cost of getting the same education in the US.
By this measure, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology would need to give back to India at least $200,000, the cost of getting an engineering degree in the US. If they are also graduates of the Indian Institutes of Management then an additional $100,000 would be owed to Indian philanthropies, the cost of an MBA education in the US.  
 

Free E Books from Project Gutenberg

A resource for improving education levels around the World.  

Over four million copies in English, French, German and Portuguese downloaded in the past 30 days.

Here is the link:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

" Project Gutenberg offers over 42,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.
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The founder Michael Hart - much thanks to him - notes on the site that there are three portions of the Project Gutenberg Library:
Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.
Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.
References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.

 Perhaps volunteers are working on soon offering free ebooks in Spanish and other major languages, including the 20 major languages in India. 

A Business Degree from a Reputed College for $5300

Easy Way For Those With Training, Partial Credits or Self Acquired Knowledge to Get a Reputed College Degree at very Low Cost.
Nice to learn from a recent article in The New York Times that there is a very cheap and easy way for adults to get a college degree from a New Jersey public college and similar institutions. The total cost for a business and associate degree was only $5300, the article says,

"At a time when student debt has passed $1 trillion, such institutions seem to have, at the very least, impeccable timing. Thomas Edison, New Jersey’s second-largest public college, and two like-minded institutions — Charter Oak State College in Connecticut and the private, nonprofit Excelsior College in New York — are all growing. .... And the idea of measuring students’ competency, not classroom hours, has become the cornerstone of newer institutions like Western Governors University in Utah," the article notes.

Here is the link to the article:

Adults Are Flocking to College That Paved Way for Flexibility

By TAMAR LEWIN;

There are almost as many routes to a degree as there are students at Thomas Edison, which has offered adults higher-education alternatives since 1972.

February 25, 2013