How to Spot Illegitimate Online Schools: 4 Major Red Flags Your Program is Bogus

Distance Education—it’s a platform designed for individuals who want to pursue a higher education but need a more flexible plan due to family and job-related obligatory. It’s also ideal for those who may not have transportation, or the contrary, for those who travel all too frequently and can’t make it to regular class sessions. Whatever the specific reason, distance education can be a lifesaver for some. But scammers and con artists are all too familiar with how important the “convenience” of online schooling is and establish fake online schools. That way, they prey on those hungry for a higher education.

These fake schools, which are better known as diploma mills, will take your “tuition” money and run straight for the hills, leaving you with a useless diploma. To make sure that you don’t enroll in a bogus online program when searching the internet, watch out for these red flags listed below.

4. Tuition is Super Cheap. Because scammers know that everyone is always looking for a bargain, illegitimate schools will offer degree programs at an extremely low price. But if your gut instinct is telling you the price seems too good to be true, chances are it is. Online universities can ultimately be cheaper than traditional schools if you factor in how much you’ll be saving on transportation and housing costs, for example, but online degree programs as a whole should cost about the same as a brick-and-mortar institution –if not, even a tad be higher, especially with for-profit online institutions. That said, do some thorough research and conduct price comparisons to see if the online version of the program you’re interested in is about the same cost as a traditional school.

3. Promise of a Quick Course. Similar to finding a bargain, scammers are also highly aware that consumers don’t want to be in school forever, and thus their fake schools promise expedited courses of study. While some online universities do offer programs that can be earned at a slight quicker time frame, the key word is slight—if the school you are looking into says that you can earn at bachelor of science in one short year but you know that it normally takes 4 years, then your ringers should go off that something is not right. Online programs, while designed to make it easier for one to “attend classes,” don’t make the length of the programs any shorter (only in rare cases). The programs are just as rigorous and informative as traditional courses and need the same amount of time to teach students.

2. No Way of Contacting the Admission Office. Those interested in a school should always be able to speak to a representative in the flesh and get more information about the program, including retention and graduation rate, booklets to course schedules, and be able to find more information about faculty and staff. If there is a number on the website to call, don’t be afraid to use it to ask for additional information. If the school sounds shady, it probably is. Go ahead and do your research about the school to see if any other consumers made any formal complaints about the school as well, don’t just go based on the good reviews the school might have posted on their site.

1. The Institution is Unaccredited. Schools that are accredited mean that they have met an ideal academic standard and are fit to meet your needs. Brick-and-mortar institutions are accredited, a nd online schools are no exception. Because scammers are smart and know that some students will be curious about accreditation, however, typically even fake schools claim to be accredited by an illegitimate agency on their website(s). Sometimes these fake accrediting agencies are easy to spot out because they sound ridiculous; but other times they sound authoritative and real— like the Global Accreditation of the Philippines— so it’s hard to question it. But you can and should question it, always.  While there are different ways to identify whether a school is legitimately accredited, one of the easier ways is to see if it’s been accredited by the Federation of Accrediting Agency of the Philippines (FAAP) or any of its caveats, including the Commission on Higher Education, (CHED) the Philippine Association of Accrediting Agencies of Schools, Colleges, and Universities (PAASCU), the Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities Commission on Accreditation (PACU-COA), the Association of Christian Schools and Colleges (ACSC), and the Accrediting Association of Chartered Colleges and Universities of the Philippines (AACCUP)—these schools are known for accrediting the more popular online schools,  including the Asian Institute for Distance Education, University of the Philippines Open University, and Penn Foster Career School just to name a few.