The rush to earn a graduate or post-graduate degree as a shortcut to earning a promotion in the government, particularly in the education department, has now become an epidemic.

Year in and year out, without fail, a number of universities, mostly second-rate institutes with dubious credits when it comes to research, have become diploma mills of individuals wanting to navigate the easy way towards getting masters and doctoral degrees.

Even in military promotions, some institutions play a role in allowing academic credits leading to a graduate degree issued even without attendance. In some instances, a thesis submitted is a rehash of an old dissertation. There are even instances when the examination panel are suspected of giving the defense student a bye in exchange for a stiff fee and a favorable mark.

Factory-made graduates (as opposed to diligent alumni) are easy to spot through the way they speak, teach, discuss, or explain subject matters. Products of diploma mills, many of them, do not even know the basics of thesis because they are not the ones doing their papers. Worse, they do not know how to use endnotes and footnotes, and ignorant about bibliographies.

Aspiring to become viable in post-tertiary instructive activities requires a better than usual appreciation of competitiveness. Especially in weeding out the pretenders, the commission on high education (CHED) should step up its policies and introduce easy, reasonable but fool-proof mechanisms that can detect bogus or half-baked masteral or doctoral courses.

Sporting a doctoral prefix is indeed a distinction. To get an ‘earned’ doctorate is by no means easy given the time, effort, and money involved. But the hardest part of obtaining a post-tertiary diploma is in honestly passing the course with plenty of personal involvement and knowledge that can be used in becoming relevant in a driven environment.

A diploma does not always reflect the way the student earns his academic incentives. But more notably, it is best to measure his skills in the manner he deliberates his proficiency of a topic, or in the facility he expresses his take of a subject. Any prefix or suffix that comes before or after an alumnus’ name carries little weight unless he has justly earned his merits.

The need to crack down diploma mills is more than just an imperative of a strong didactic organization; it also reflects the resolve and sincerity of the government to offer only the best produce from its educational system. Bright and disciplined minds define the kind of academic experience a country’s population is exposed to. Without an educational foundation that allows its harvests to compete with the demands of the global academic landscape, a country, especially campuses, cannot healthily vie with the best that the world can proffer.

Not that there are hundreds of colleges and universities producing second-rate graduates, but the very few institutions that participate in the destruction of our educational system should be made to answer for their unwarranted exploitation of students in the name of fiscal sufficiency.

If we allow schools to get credit for having produced a wagon of graduate and post-graduate achievers, such honor cannot be considered well founded if those who earn their degrees have obtained their diplomas in ways that do not fairly reflect the title they affix to their names.

Titles are not for posterity; they are bestowed for reason that the one who has earned it is a cut above others who have not received a similar training. Of course, experience, which is the father of knowledge, is in the long run better than any diploma earned through deceit and money.

To paraphrase Dr. Jose P. Rizal, “Without [honestly earned] education and liberty, which are the soil and the sun of man, no reform is possible, no measure can give the result desired.”