The man selected to run Marion County’s troubled Juvenile Detention Center has a master’s degree from a “diploma mill” shut down by the Federal Trade Commission.
Troy Hoppes, 36, claims he did course work over the Internet to earn the degree from the University of Ravenhurst in New York.
But New York and national education officials say Ravenhurst was an online university that had no campus and did not require academic work — instead selling degrees through call centers in Israel and Romania.
Marion Superior Court officials who hired Hoppes last week touted the degree as one of the attributes that made him stand out among about 30 candidates, even though it wasn’t required for the job.
Officials said Thursday that they are standing behind Hoppes, who is scheduled to begin the $80,000-a-year job Oct. 9.
Here’s the June 2004 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, referred to in the sidebar to the article.
And then, get this:
Miller said Hoppes was upfront about the degree during the interview process, telling officials the online program “was not the most rigorous academic environment.” He said court officials did not look into the school any further.
“Not the most rigorous academic environment”? I guess not, since all you needed was Visa or MasterCard to graduate.
Hoppes defended his degree.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “I completed the courses required by the university to receive my degree legitimately.”
Hoppes said he did research-based assignments, participated in virtual classroom sessions and received credit for professional and life experiences over an approximately one-year period before receiving a degree in 2002.
But a retired FBI agent who has tracked degree mills for the past decade said that’s contrary to everything he knows about Ravenhurst, which also sold transcripts and letters of recommendation.
“Ain’t no way,” said Allen Ezell, co-author of the book “Degree Mills: The Billion Dollar Industry That Has Sold More Than One Million Fake Degrees.”
“They aren’t set up for that. There was no faculty. They were all salesmen.”
During the same time Hoppes claims he was working toward the degree, Ezell said, he had an informant in the Bucharest call center that sold Ravenhurst diplomas along with degrees from about a dozen other fake universities. Ravenhurst’s Web site was shut down in 2003.
Marion Superior Court officials need to be slapped twice. THIS GUY IS A FRAUD. If he’ll stoop to buying a sheepskin from a degree mill and then lie about it when asked, he’s not suitable to hold any responsible job in our court system.
And if you hired him because of the master’s degree, and the master’s degree is fake, then what’s left that makes him a superior candidate?
Court officials need to reverse course, and that soon.
UPDATE, 9/9/06:
The man named to run the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center lost the chance after he failed to offer tests or other papers to verify that he completed course work for a master’s degree.
County court officials withdrew their job offer Friday, a week after Troy Hoppes was named superintendent and the same day The Indianapolis Star reported that the master’s degree he claimed to have came from a “diploma mill” shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in 2003.
Good.
(Full story here.)