My Years at the Degree Mill

Welcome to for-profit education, where a degree’s just a pricey commodity, and an instructor’s a troublesome budget line.

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

Before I had a career, I had a PhD that I had no clue what to do with, and the chronic illness earning that PhD had given me.

I could not work the way the academy had trained me to — in long monastic bouts locked away in an office, the cold overhead lights casting my sad grey reflection onto the starless night in the windows. I only had a few hours of energy in me. I could walk for a little while each day, and complete a couple of rote tasks or write some emails, but then I’d feel a predictable chill — and it wasn’t long after the chill started that I would be woozy and feverish and need to lie down under multiple blankets and sweat away the rest of the day.

It was during this time that I found a part-time job that was, at least, sustainable for my ailing body. I’d be teaching online classes for a university many hundreds of miles away from where I lived, mostly large-enrollment, basic requirement courses like Intro to Psychology or Social Psychology. In addition, I would be paid a small stipend to mentor the next generation of graduate students, and serve as the advisor on dozens of those students’ dissertations.

The position came with no benefits or job security. I had no long-term contract, just bi-monthly paychecks rolling in that could be terminated at any time, even in the middle of a term.

The job requirements were harsh: I had to be sure to respond to all student messages within twenty-four hours, and grade all submitted assignments within a week, or else I would be fired without notice. There were monthly all-hands meetings I was required to attend, though I had no say in when they were scheduled, and they often conflicted with my other jobs or my doctor’s appointments.

I was assigned classes and PhD students seemingly at random, with zero input in the matter, then held fully responsible for all my students’ academic success. A part-timer with four other jobs myself, I was my students’ sole source of career support, performance evaluation, and academic advising.

I did all of this in exchange for about $2000 per semester per class, or $600 per semester per graduate student. When I had a large course load, this worked out to a few hundred dollars in take-home pay every two weeks. A lot of the time, it was far less. I performed this as my side-hustle job for years, from the fall of 2016 until the summer of 2021, stealing my lunch breaks and evenings from myself to read through poorly-edited student research proposals and grade papers using the university’s standardized rubric with its janky, web 1.0 radio buttons.

In that time I must have seen at least 500 students pass through my classes, though most never got to be more than names and student ID numbers on a screen. The workloads for the courses I was assigned to teach were punishing. If I disagreed with a quizzes' pre-written answer key, or felt that a student’s paper had merit despite not fully aligning with the assigned rubric, there was nothing that I could do. I couldn’t offer extensions on late work, no matter the circumstances.

In any given course that I taught, roughly 25% of the students would wind up dropping out, having fallen behind on the litany of forum posts, quizzes, timed exams, paper assignments, and group presentations they were required to complete, usually only after the university’s official drop deadline had passed and their tuition checks had been cashed.

My graduate students didn’t fare any better — a handful of them were well-prepared for self-directed study and research, and rushed through their PhDs in spite of my limited capacity to support them, but the majority spent years ping-ponging the same drafts back and forth with me with minimal edits, making little progress until they ran out of money and left the program.

The few PhD students I had that did graduate struggled to find work, much as I had struggled to find work, except their diplomas were marked with the taint of a notorious degree mill. And so they ended up joining me in my work at the degree mill, the mass email announcing their graduation soon followed by an email announcing their employment as an advisor to the next crop of dozens of high-paying, under-performing PhD students. A great many of those PhD students had once been undergraduate students at the degree mill too, having paid upwards of $22,000 per year on average to write papers and complete web-based quizzes for a tired, overworked recent graduate to half-assedly grade, and eventually being given a degree for the trouble.

Every year, 140,000 people graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in this country. The number of psychology graduates has been steadily increasing for years. But very few psychology graduates manage to find a career that is directly related to their chosen field. About 25% of all psychology undergraduates wind up attending graduate school, but only 14% make it all the way through and earn an advanced degree. Of these graduates, a majority get a master’s degree, which is rarely sufficient to become a practicing psychologist, lead researcher, or full-time professor.

Just 4% — or about 7,000 students per year — go on to earn a PhD in psychology. And there aren’t enough jobs even for them. There are only about 1,400 open psychology professor positions at universities this year, spread across a variety of departments and subfields. Many of them are part-time, adjunct teaching jobs — like mine was at the degree mill.

In order to hold onto our jobs as part-time instructors, us teachers at the degree mill had to keep a steady crop of new undergraduate & graduate students coming in. These students paid for our meager salaries with their tuition dollars, unaware that by pursuing a psychology degree at such a poorly-regarded school, they were playing a game they’d be statistically doomed to lose.

As psychology PhDs with genuine (if underpaying) professorship jobs, me and my colleagues had reached the near-apex of the pyramid scheme. And in return for it we had dozens of hours of work per week, no intellectual freedom, no genuine relationship to our students, and very little money to show. But that still put us in a better position than the tens of thousands of other aspiring psychologists who’d flunked out with nothing but six figures of debt.

This is what it was like working at a degree mill.

An example of what the grading rubrics for my undergraduate courses often looked like.

I wake up and pull my laptop out from the tangle of my bedsheets. One of the very first and last things that I do each day is log in to my online classes at the degree mill, to see whether any students have submitted forum posts or turned in any assignments. If they have, the clock has started ticking, and I need to return feedback and a grade before the day’s end if I want to keep my job. I teach between one and four courses per semester, in addition to mentoring between 15 and 20 graduate students.

This time, it’s a light semester: two courses, each with about 25 students in them (though really, only about half that many are active). In one of the courses, Social Psychology, there’s two new responses to the week’s forum prompt, and four additional comments. Students are expected to write two 500-word responses to forum prompts that are tangentially relevant to course’s subject matter each week, and leave at least three “substantive” comments on their peers’ posts of at least 200 words.

I am required to leave a detailed response to each one of these postings, and assign grades within a day of their being posted. If I mess up and assign full points to a post that’s only 350 words long, say, or one that doesn’t include at least two APA-style citations, a faculty advisor who monitors my class will catch it and penalize me. If I get enough penalties, I will be fired.

I don’t understand how the degree mill can afford to have a second faculty member in the class and reproducing all of my work, but I suppose it’s feasible when everybody’s barely getting paid. Together, the two of us do a single job twice, for half the pay each.

I copy each new forum post that my students have made into Microsoft Word, to double check the length, perform a quick spelling and grammar check, review their citations, and scan them for forbidden words like “me” and “I.” The degree mill has a lot of arbitrary-seeming rules for student writing, and many of them have nothing to do with actual professional standards in psychology. Still, I have to enforce them or I’ll be caught and penalized.

For example, the degree mill has put a ban on anthropomorphization. A student should never describe a non-living object taking an action that only a human being could. If a student were to write, for example, that “The American Psychological Association has historically discriminated against professionals with personality disorders,” they would be docked points, because a thing cannot discriminate. It doesn’t matter if they’re describing a true pattern of bias, or using a literary flourish that anybody could easily understand. They need to describe which specific humans took which actions — nothing larger or more abstract can be written about. And since they are barred from using personal pronouns, students can never write of their own impressions or experiences at all.

After I’ve finished checking the forum posts for a variety of offenses, I type their grades into a little white box on the class interface. A small comment field pops up, where I must leave at least 150 words in personalized student feedback. A colleague gave me a tip once: I can pre-write hundreds of generic comments in advance, and keep them together in a big Word document to select from and personalize when I need them. This has saved me a ton of time.

I find a relevant comment in my document file, and begin to edit it:

“Emilio, thank you for your carefully-written and well-cited reflection. You have correctly identified the ethical principles that were violated by the study you were assigned to read. You have also successfully named several of the groups that were harmed by this action…”

Once I’ve gotten to 100 words, I hit send. Then I move on to reviewing the other students’ comments, acknowledging them and assigning them grades.

In another of my courses, Introduction to Psychology, students have been working on group presentations. Student groups are assigned randomly by the course management program. Many students are forced to work with people they have never spoken to before, or who live many time zones away. Some group members are ghosts who have never logged into the class at all. It’s not unusual for there to be only one active student in a group of four or five.

Sometimes, I think it might actually be easier to work on an assignment when one has no group partners. I monitor the group chats and I see how difficult it is for students to coordinate efforts, or get their peers to turn anything in on time. Usually the most assertive and neurotic student of the bunch will create the lion’s share of the material — in this case, 15 PowerPoint slides on a psychological disorder of their choice.

These presentations will never actually be presented to anyone, naturally. There are no actual class sessions, no live, synchronous component to the class. That would only present a barrier that might keep some potential students from enrolling and paying for the class, after all. And so, all the presentation slides my students have created won’t be shared with anybody but me.

There’s a rubric I am required to use to grade the finished work. It functions essentially like an online survey, round buttons on the interface corresponding to a series of fields. If there are four or more citations and they’re written up correctly, the “scientific support” component of the assignment should be graded a 5/5. If there are no grammatical issues, the editing component gets a 3/3. I have to leave comments under each point value I have selected, explaining the rationale for my choice. “Great work supporting your argument with 3 citations!”; “Several of your sentences lack a verb,” and so on.

Every assignment is scored based on the categories of grammar, support, formatting, and “content.” There’s very little consideration of writerly craft or voice, and no benefit to approaching the assignment with any unique thought. As long as it checks off the requisite boxes and is loosely relevant to the topic of the week, an assignment qualifies for a high score. But very few actually do. The students have had almost no training in writing or grammar, let alone social science. This is an open-enrollment for-profit university; the students are just a revenue source, and therefore signed up for classes without concern for prerequisites or preparation.

I go through every assignment submission, painstakingly leaving comments on everything that can be improved and linking students to resources and examples of correctly-completed work. Very few of my students take the time to read any of this; a person who earns D’s at the beginning of the class almost inevitably earns D’s at the end too, or drops out. It’s not because they are lazy, or disinterested in success. They’re working full-time jobs, most of them, completing assignments during evenings and weekends in much the same way that I do my grading.

I do what I can to offer them some way forward. But many of them feel completely stuck. Often a history of past academic frustrations and “failures” already trails behind them, which can make critical feedback really emotionally hard for them to receive. They already think they don’t deserve to be here. The degree mill capitalizes on their insecurities, their past lack of educational access; if a student struggles, they blame themselves rather than the school.

Grading leaves me bleary-eyed with a crick in my neck. It’s tedious, slow-going work. Sometimes I get tempted to scroll through all the rubrics selecting buttons randomly, or just give everybody A’s so that I can be done for the day. But of course, I will be caught if I do that, and it would only harm my students, who receive no guidance beyond what I have to give.

So I take the work seriously and leave my detailed feedback. This takes hours. I am making $170 per week.

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

I have no control over the number of PhD students I am assigned to mentor, or how many dissertations I have to read. Unlike in a conventional university, I do not get to choose my mentees, and the projects I’m assigned may have nothing to do with my expertise. If it’s a social science degree, or an education degree, I can be put in charge of it — the student’s coach, project manager, evaluator, career counselor, and friend.

Students are added and dropped from my roster without notice all the time because they have missed a tuition payment, or failed to make adequate progress on their projects. Sometimes students that I have met with weekly for years and encouraged through all manner of personal crises disappear, and I only find out later they were assigned to some other instructor for reasons that none of us know.

At the same time, some students languish with me for years, having already completed their coursework but making zero progress on their dissertations, because they were so inadequately prepared for graduate school. Most of my students are industrious, but very few have any understanding of statistics, research methodology, or the philosophy of science. They’ve simply never been taught these things, and their graduate applications never screened for them. Some barely know how to use a computer or write. Their undergraduate degrees are mostly also from the degree mill, and I know firsthand how poorly we teach such things.

Whenever a student sends me a draft of their dissertation, I am required to return it, fully read and filled with feedback, within ten days. This is difficult when I am stuck working with upwards of twenty PhD students at a time, with varying ability levels and support needs. Some have collected data but have no idea how to analyze it. Others fill their citation lists with articles from far-right news websites or social media postings instead of peer-reviewed literature.

In addition to the paper grading, I am required to meet with graduate students one-on-one any time they ask. One of my students is an elementary school teacher by day, and his dissertation topic is an educational intervention for Autistic students. It’s a happy accident; his interests align with mine.

I send him papers that I think he ought to read, and encourage him to consider strengths-based and neurodiversity approaches to disability. He calls me up crying, because I have been critical of his work. He says that he’s frustrated and thinks he should drop out. He emails me his tuition bills and spells out to me exactly how much he has paid so far in pursuit of his PhD, and says it hasn’t been worth it. He begs me to approve his dissertation, to move him forward, or else to tell him that he should give up.

This happens every single time that I request any edits from him, no matter how small — he becomes overwhelmed and resentful, and wants me to justify his enrollment at the degree mill, to tell him whether he deserves to stay or should go. I am never allowed to consult a student on such questions — because the degree mill doesn’t want anyone to drop out.

I know that if I were to pass this student’s dissertation, the rest of his committee would fail him in an instant, and send him back to the drawing board. This has happened to him with other advisors at least two times. When he asks me how to write “correctly,” my heart breaks, because I don’t even know where to start — he doesn’t know what a hypothesis is. I explain it to him dozens of ways, in numerous marginal comments and emails and Zoom conversations, but he’s just not ready to grasp the concept.

It seems to me that this student needs to start over from the very beginning, to take Intro to Psychology all over again at a real institution, with an instructor who really cares about him. But that won’t happen. The degree mill has upheld their part of the bargain. He’s paid tens of thousands of dollars for a diploma. And now he wants to do it again. I can hardly blame him for believing all the lies he’s been told.

Eventually my student’s anguished emails verge on the suicidal. I reach out to my boss for help and she schedules a few meetings with him, encouraging him to keep his head up, to press on. She tells me afterward that I have done a good job ‘managing’ him and keeping him enrolled. A year later he drops out, after many more rounds of panic and tears.

“I found an online group for other [degree mill] students,” he writes me one day, using his personal email because our contact through the university has been shut off. “Have you seen it? Everybody has problems here.”

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

I join a private Facebook group for graduate students at the degree mill. It is filled with complaints of neglect and institutional mismanagement.

“I only had one chapter left to write, and then my advisor stopped replying to me,” says one student. “I only found out six weeks later she had been fired.”

“I had a whole new committee just assigned to me,” says another. “One of them doesn’t approve of my study design, so I have to start all over again.”

“Can somebody explain to me what a ‘mean’ is?” Asks a woman who has been enrolled for seven years. “My new advisor says I need to calculate the mean on my data.”

It brings me some comfort to see the reality of the scam dawning on so many of them. Reading their complaints about absent advisors, inconsistent policies, and a lack of preparation also affirms that I am sane— that all the problems I’ve been observing exist far beyond me.

There is something profoundly wrong going on here — nearly 100,000 enrolled students and almost none of them seem to graduate, all of them going into far more debt than the degree mill’s advertising promised. They don’t have job prospects, they don’t have skills, they don’t even really have teachers — part-time professors like me are little more than credentialed chatbots, filling in our required checkboxes, replaceable in a few years with generative AI.

I click back over to my virtual classroom. Forty final exams to grade, with a class average grade of 65%. Dozens of forum posts to read and respond to. Three new dissertations in my inbox, their authors begging for my immediate counsel so they don’t have to enroll in another semester at $8,000ish a pop.

There is no doubt I am complicit in all of this. Sure, I am getting screwed like all the other instructors. Virtually all of us have advanced degrees that are growing in popularity even while the job market for us dwindles — but by being here we are also contributing to those terrible statistics. How many psychology PhDs do we mint each year, in a job market where there’s fewer tenure-track jobs than ever? How can I cheerlead someone along a professional path that has so obviously failed me and so many others? Is all this work and lying worth the grocery money?

Another email lands in my inbox. A graduate student of mine is in her seventies and going blind. Though I’ve suggested a few screen-reading programs, she’s not yet familiar with any adaptive technology. She can barely operate her email. Her son does most everything for her, delivering her medicine, shoveling her stoop, and reading my feedback aloud to her when he comes over to visit.

She’s been working on a dissertation about criminal recidivism for years, driven by a real passion for the young people in her community who have gotten caught in the prison system’s revolving doors. Her research proposal has yet to be approved, because it is not feasible or likely to ever be approved of by any university’s ethics board. She prays on the unending problem of her dissertation every day, she tells me, and thanks the Lord for me and my support.

I try to tell her that she can’t just go into a jail and interview people in an open-ended way, like she wants to, but she keeps trying to make that plan work. Most of the drafts she sends me are a visual mess because she can’t see the document editing program. I fix things here and there when I can understand what she’s going for, and during phone calls I attempt to translate her words into text and suggest new study designs that are simpler and more likely to pass review. But she’s not getting any closer to completion. I feel guilty and hopeless every time that she calls.

Today she tells me that her own mother, who is in her nineties, has just suffered a terrible fall. My student has hip problems of her own — and knee problems, and various other ailments — but now her elderly mother will be moving in with her. She says that she might fall behind on her studies for a little while, but that with God’s help anything is possible, and she is so thankful for me and the moral, Christian learning environment that the degree mill provides.

I write back that I will keep praying for her health and academic progress, though of course I don’t pray and don’t expect much good to come out of this. Showing her a little care is the literal least I can do, a bit of sweetness on the knife. I don’t think I hear from her again, not for weeks, not for months — and I get to wondering whether her mother has died, or she has. But apparently her payments to the degree mill keep coming in, because she remains on my advising list the whole rest of the year.

I should feel bad. But it’s also a relief. An enrolled and yet inactive student is one less person I have making demands of me at this job. Lord knows I never have enough time.

A photo of the Clover Grill in New Orleans, taken by me during a vacation in 2021.

Ultimately I do not leave the degree mill out of principle, but because a robot fires me.

It’s the first summer after getting the COVID-19 vaccine, when the U.S. government is still telling everyone that our reward for vaccination is being able to travel freely and without masks. My family books a trip together down to New Orleans, and we spend our first few days wandering around in the thick humidity with lots of drinks sloshing in our bellies. My sister has found us an affordable Best Western hotel with a courtyard pool, and we go around doing the standard touristy shit — boat tours, po’ boys, visiting haunted graveyards at midnight.

I have so much fun that for one entire day I forget to check my phone.

When I get home, I have an email from the degree mill telling me that several forum posts have not been replied to in well over a day, and that because of this, my contract has been terminated. My classes have already been removed from my university account and reassigned to someone else. My payments have been stopped. My graduate students are taken away.

I talk to HR and explain my situation, but they don’t care. I try calling my boss and pleading with her for an exception to be made, but she doesn’t ever respond. I have known her for over five years, and have always met with her at least once a month. Now I don’t exist to her, the same way my own students stop existing in my inbox the moment they stop paying fees.

I am still included in the graduation email blasts, though. In fact, I still get them to this day. Amalia Nelson has completed her PhD in Education! Everyone please congratulate Phil Rosca on his Criminal Science Degree!

Please take me off this mailing list, I reply all to say every couple of months. I don’t work here anymore. This place is a multi-level-marketing scheme. Please join the student groups on Facebook and see their complaints. A robot fired me because I didn’t reply to a forum once. Stop sending me these things. But they never do. I might as well be just another tantrumming student, complaining about their mountains of debt and lack of a degree.

A couple of years after I am fired, the degree mill is investigated by the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Trade Commission, and fined for misleading its students. Then recently, two former PhD students brought charges of racketeering against the degree mill in a class action lawsuit. In both cases, the degree mill has been accused of lying repeatedly & systematically to students about what a degree from their institution will cost. The two graduate students claim the degree mill has created “artificial bottlenecks” that delay student progress and force people to take many more courses than they are supposedly required to.

“Byzantine review procedures…prevent doctoral students from communicating directly with key dissertation reviewers,” reads the racketeering complaint.

Having been a dissertation reviewer for the degree mill, and having experienced myself being hidden away from my own students at random times for unclear reasons, I would say that I fully agree. I witnessed numerous times how difficult it was for even the most conscientious and skillful of students to make it forward, because if their part-time advisor quit, was fired, or was randomly reassigned, the student had to essentially begin their entire dissertation writing process from scratch with someone new. Almost every graduate student that I ever worked with had experienced this multiple times.

Today it almost feels anachronistic to speak about my experiences at the degree mill, because they all happened before the popularization of generative AI. In those days the degree mill leeched broke, desperate, over-credentialed and underpaid instructors like myself for cheap labor, repackaging our rote grading as “hands-on mentorship” and “advising” and charging exorbitant fees for it.

Work is a Chronic Illness

But now, much of the job could be automated. The forum posts that students make could be read and responded to by language-learning models. Chat GPT can scan for word counts and hazily string together somewhat relevant feedback just as easily as I can for even less money. A language-learning model could fill out rubrics for papers and presentations after a quick scan for citations and margin size. The professor might as well be replaced with an AI-generated photo of an imagined professional who never misses a meeting and never replies to emails late. Almost everything about the academic process can be standardized and bureaucratized, AI-professors granting people with AI-written dissertations entirely symbolic doctoral degrees.

I think it is worth looking at this recent past, though, because it presages what’s to come. The only reason the degree mill paid living, human instructors was because it had to, and still it shelled out as little as it could. And while the degree mill represents an especially egregious instance for labor exploitation, its values and operating principles are not different from your average university’s. Most schools operate based on the simple calculation of enrollment over operating costs. Each student is a source of revenue, each instructor a troubling budget line. And most institutions will do everything they can to balance those books and turn the profit margins in their favor.

Even at the most academically rigorous of institutions, the number of full-time and tenure-tracked professors has dwindled over the years, courses filled instead with transient part-timers who get dismissed for anything from failing to submit a lesson plan months before they ever will get paid, to posting online about their politics.

As the number of potential new undergraduate students reaches its limit and enrollment numbers stagnate, universities have grown desperate in their search for new income sources. And so the launch more graduate programs, and mint more more advance degrees (regardless of whether there are jobs for the workers with these credentials). Trends are chased, and forms of supposedly ‘needless’ spending are cut without remorse.

Numerous universities have cut entire academic departments devoted to the humanities, because they aren’t money-makers. The study of foreign languages & literatures may go completely extinct because so many institutions have cut their programs. On the flip side, numerous new graduate & undergraduate degree programs get launched based on short-term technology industry fads that may never actually translate to either student enrollments or paying jobs.

More and more, I hear university administrators embracing both the use and study of AI, citing surveys in which hiring managers claim that they’d prefer to have employees with “AI skills” than ones with years of work experience. Faculty members lean onto AI for everything from writing letters of recommendation to authoring their course exams, staff use AI to sit in on all meetings and transcribe meeting minutes, university marketing professionals ask AI to help them write copy, and departments announce their brand-new AI Technology bachelor’s degrees.

But what is the benefit of a degree in AI technologies when the academic curriculum was put together by a language-learning model and the students had ChatGPT write all their code? What kind of labor market are we creating for our students, if every task we complete at our own jobs is thrown together by a statistical algorithm? And what are these mysterious “AI skills” that I keep hearing so much about the importance of, other than the ability to write a prompt and paste its results into an email?

I fail to see how any of this meaningfully differs from hiring a classmate to write your papers for you — or shelling out money to a predatory online college to print you a degree. Members of my generation have already spent more than a decade bemoaning that a college degree is now an obligatory but valueless credential, a few letters after your name that you simply have to get if you ever want a job, but which does not necessarily enrich your life, certainly not to the extent that it used to. But what happens when education has fully become a commodity, just an object to be bought that the student does not participate in?

How many students today are already sending in AI-generated coursework to AI-directed classes, taking literally no agency over their own educations and getting nothing back? And how much longer will educational institutions act like the degree mill does, and conclude that so long as the check clears, this arrangement is enough?

I’ve worked at a lot of educational institutions over the years, so I have my hypotheses about just how far this will go. But you don’t really need my small, flawed, human narrative to convince you. Just look around you. Or ask Google Gemini.