20 Fake Colleges That Sold Degrees Through The Mail

In 1860, John Buchanan took over as dean of the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, turning the legitimate school into a diploma mill. Over the course of the next two decades, he sold as many as 10,000 bogus M.D. diplomas (an estimate that was never audited) to customers throughout North America and Europe. When a newspaper’s sting operation revealed the scam in 1880 and Buchanan was charged with fraud, he hired a decoy to leap from a ferry and presumably drown, while Buchanan himself ran away. The authorities apprehended him weeks later, and the school shut its doors permanently.

Harry T. Brundidge, a reporter with the St. Louis Star, posed as a coal salesman called “Harry Thompson” during the autumn of 1923 in an effort to discover the identities of two physicians who ran a multi-state scam involving two Missouri medical schools. For about $600, he purchased a fake high school diploma, an M.D. degree with a back-dated registration, and a state medical license, none of which he ever intended to use. His exposés led prosecutors to estimate that 10,000 to 15,000 unqualified practitioners nationwide were working on purchased credentials, though the figure was never audited.

Verna and Carl Hansen conducted their Pioneer Theological Seminary out of Rockford, Illinois, during the 1950s. They sold mail-order divinity and theology doctorates for cash. There was no campus, no faculty, no library. One buyer was Ian Paisley, the future Northern Irish Protestant preacher and politician, who purchased a Bachelor of Divinity and was also awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity by the seminary in 1954. In 1960, federal authorities put Pioneer Theological Seminary on the government’s newly created public list of bogus degree mills.

McKinley-Roosevelt Incorporated opened its Chicago “university” in the 1920s. It used two past presidents’ names as a brand to give itself the appearance of legitimacy. It offered home-study doctorate degrees in philosophy, psychology, and the arts for a small fee and an unannotated essay, but never reviewed the student work at all. British writer Paul Brunton obtained a Ph.D. from McKinley-Roosevelt Incorporated in 1938. Eventually, the FTC looked into the fraudulent use of the presidents’ names, and McKinley-Roosevelt Incorporated was shut down in 1947. It is not related to Roosevelt University in Chicago.

An ordained Lutheran minister named Helmuth Peter Holler called himself “Bishop Theodolithos” after starting an occult organization he called Universal Theomonism. In 1904, he founded a mail-order school in Washington, D.C., called Oriental University. The school sold doctorates in medicine, law, theology, and philosophy by mail for no classes taken or work done. In 1916, one recipient was a London cosmetic surgeon. Federal postal inspectors followed the scheme, and in March 1927 Holler was found guilty of mail fraud and sent to prison. Oriental University closed with him.

Sulgrave Manor is the actual ancestral home of George Washington’s family in England. In the late 1940s, fraudsters used the manor’s name to create the “University of Sulgrave” and claimed it was a centuries-old British university. Operating only via mail-drop offices in England and the US, the school sold doctorate and master’s degrees to American professionals looking for fancy European-sounding diplomas without doing any study whatsoever. It was revealed to be an unaccredited degree mill in the 1950s. It had nothing to do with the real Sulgrave Manor trust.

In the 1890s, James and Thomas Armstrong incorporated the Metropolitan Medical College in Chicago and began mailing M.D. diplomas all over North America and even to Europe for a fee. There was no need to attend, study, or pass any exams. Federal postal inspectors raided the brothers’ Chicago office in 1900, confiscated their records, and arrested James along with his cohorts. Convicted of federal mail fraud, James was sent to prison, and the business closed for good.

John Cook Bennett, a doctor and a booster who was eventually to become a prominent early Mormon leader in Nauvoo, Illinois, took advantage of loose Indiana chartering laws in 1833 to incorporate Christian College in New Albany, Indiana. In his role as chancellor, he sold M.D. diplomas, unearned and delivered by mail, for a small fee, justifying his actions as crediting “life experience” rather than actual study. Indiana state legislators and medical societies railed against the scheme. Bennett abandoned it and fled the state. His scheme is considered the earliest documented mail-order medical diploma mill in American history.

During the 1870s and 1880s, William Farr operated an international degree-peddling ring from offices in Chicago and London, calling his fake universities “Liberty University of Chicago” and “Boston University of Medicine.” There was no real school behind either name. He placed advertisements in European newspapers promising that he would issue forged M.D. parchments at a price. There were no classes, no tests. When complaints reached Britain’s government about the fraud, the British appealed to the U.S. State Department for help, and eventually the matter reached the federal courts, where Farr was found guilty. Today’s Liberty University is not related to Farr’s organization, nor is today’s Boston University.

In the 1880s, the “Druid University of Maine” offered medical degrees based on ancient, hidden wisdom. In fact, it was simply a mail-order medical degree mill. In 1889, a Boston journalist named Henry A. Wright visited the Druid University and managed to purchase an M.D. degree without ever attending classes or passing exams. The resulting article in a Boston newspaper led to a huge scandal, and the Maine legislature rescinded the school’s charter shortly thereafter.

The Chicago-based Independent Medical College was incorporated under state law in the 1890s. The college offered “fast” medical degrees, advertised across North America. For just $25 sent by mail, students received a diploma designating them M.D., with no laboratories or clinical rotations required. In 1899, the state of Illinois sued the school to shut it down, and the state supreme court stripped the college of its corporate charter. That decision provided the legal blueprint to close diploma mills.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Golden State University, otherwise known as Hollywood University, sold its mail-order diplomas in the arts, philosophy, and naturopathy, a type of alternative medicine, to wannabe filmmakers, authors, and health practitioners. Paying customers received elaborate diplomas simply for paying tuition, with no legitimate education or training provided. State licensing boards investigated and shut down the enterprise in the late 1950s. The university had no relation to Golden Gate University in San Francisco.

The “National University of Illinois” was incorporated in Chicago in 1889. It exploited a loophole in Illinois state corporate law to offer bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees by mail, with no actual campus, faculty, or courses. When purchasers began trying to use the diplomas to land professional positions, the Illinois State Board of Health investigated, blacklisted the institution, and deemed all of its degrees fake. The National University of Illinois has no affiliation with the University of Illinois.

In 1894, Fred Rutland organized the Wisconsin Eclectic Medical College of Milwaukee and claimed the school was dedicated to teaching students “eclectic medicine.” This was an alternative medicine tradition of the 19th century that could be legitimate, but here it was merely window dressing. In reality, the school issued fake medical degrees that required no study or even clinical experience. The ruse worked until students attempted to register as doctors in places like Oklahoma and Kansas, where local medical boards were unable to verify any clinical infrastructure at the school and declared it a fraud.

In the 1920s, a fraudulent degree mill known as “Trinity College” in Dover, Delaware, took advantage of the ease with which the State of Delaware allowed corporations to be formed. The entire scheme was conducted by post office box, mailing offers of academic and religious degrees throughout the United States for cash, without any classes, tests, or study required. The Post Office Department eventually banned it from using the mail, closing it down permanently. There is no connection between this institution and Trinity College in Hartford or Trinity College Dublin.

A defunct institution known as Lincoln-Jefferson University was incorporated in Chicago, operating in the 1910s and 1920s. It offered mail-order degrees for brief home study courses advertised in magazines across the country. Students paid cash prices marked down from the face value of their certificates, which included an ornately decorated diploma conferring a doctorate in pharmacy, a bachelor’s degree in law, or a doctorate in philosophy. The mail-order university was shut down following public notices by the federal government and rejections of its graduates by state bar associations in the 1920s. This defunct school had no connection to either Lincoln University or Thomas Jefferson University.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Chartered University of Huron operated as an international mail-order diploma mill, leasing mailbox addresses in London and the United States and offering degrees, including bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate, for a flat fee to anyone in the world. It had no campus, no library, and no professors. It was shut down by authorities for being a mailbox institution in the late 1950s. It is not connected at all to the Huron University College in Ontario, Canada.

In 1909, John L. Strauss set up the American Extension School of Law in Chicago, where he ran the enterprise single-handedly for almost 40 years. He peddled home-study correspondence courses in national magazines that guaranteed a Bachelor of Laws degree in exchange for tuition, without much actual instruction or testing. It was only in 1948 that the Federal Trade Commission formally ordered it to stop operating, finding it to be a deceptive trade practice, at which point it was shut down. That case inspired state bar associations to forbid taking the bar exam with a correspondence degree.

In 1927, C. J. Burton established Pikes Peak Bible Seminary in Manitou Springs, Colorado, eventually renaming it Burton College and Seminary. The school provided home study programs for divinity degrees and Doctor of Theology diplomas for flat cash payments with no legitimate accredited study required. Hundreds of ministers in the United States and abroad purchased degrees from Pikes Peak Bible Seminary in order to advance their careers within their respective congregations. Because state laws exempted religious schools from oversight, it was difficult to close these institutions. For that reason, it took a federal campaign in April 1960 to blacklist the school.

Operating from Kansas City, Missouri, Neotarian’s “college of philosophy” was heavily advertised in pulp and hobby magazines in the postwar years. For tuition, the college issued mail-order Ph.D.s in philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics, with no accredited coursework necessary, and even catered to foreign customers. Rodolfo Cornejo, the Filipino composer, bought a degree in 1947. But as complaints mounted over the proliferation of such mail-order mills, U.S. Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Arthur Flemming published a federal blacklist. On April 25, 1960, Neotarian was on that list. The college shut down, and with it, symbolically, an era.

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