TheStreet.com reporter picks Diploma Mill operator Cenuco which is currently under investigation by General Accounting Office as to 25 pick thestreet.com
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The skinny on Cenuco
FEE FOR CERTIFICATE
By CHRISTOPHER BYRON
June 7, 2004 -- A plague of fishy sheepskins is spreading through Corporate America.
That's the startling finding from a Post investigation that has uncovered more than 80 public companies in which members of the brass have dressed up their resumes with degrees from so-called diploma mill universities.
The term "diploma mill" has no specific meaning under law. But according to Webster's dictionary, it describes any institution that grants relatively worthless degrees and diplomas for a fee.
The embarrassing love affair with these academically suspect pieces of parchment also puts the spotlight on an American Stock Exchange-listed company called Cenuco Inc., which sells the degrees to the public through a subsidiary called "Barrington University."
The Post investigation, based on a computerized search of filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, uncovered 15 different chairmen and CEOs, 29 corporate board members and 40 other top officials of public companies who have burnished their resumes with diplomas and degrees from Barrington U. and 17 similar operations.
Though they bear tweedy names like Columbia State University and Kensington University, none are recognized as authentic institutions of higher learning by any legitimate U.S. accrediting body.
Yet business is booming anyway, because actually providing an education is not the point of these outfits. Their real purpose is merely to provide the sort of convincing-looking credentials that help someone pretend to be a graduate of a prestigious institution of higher learning.
Since no federal laws set standards for institutions purporting to grant college and graduate-level degrees, and since regulation at the state level is haphazard, it is easy enough for credential-hungry CEOs to lift themselves from obscurity by dressing up their resumes with a convincing-sounding advanced degree.
All 18 of the "universities" unearthed in the Post investigation are already banned from operating in Oregon and Michigan, which have some of the nation's strictest laws against the use of diploma-mill certificates and degrees. But regulation is almost non-existent in Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and several other states, which many diploma mills now call home. Thanks to the growth of the Internet, other mills have simply moved abroad, to places like Liberia, St. Kitts and the Seychelles.
THE Post investigation found diploma mill certificates on the re sumes of fake eggheads in top positions at a total of 84 separate companies. They ranged from computer software giant PeopleSoft Inc., which trades on the Nasdaq, to little-known Cenuco Inc., which bore the name Virtual Academies.com Inc. until 2003.
Cenuco, which last month moved up from the OTC Bulletin Board to a listing on the American Stock Exchange, is headquartered in Boca Raton, Fla., but its "Barrington University" subsidiary operates out of an office in Alabama.
The father/son team that founded Barrington, Robert and Steven Bettinger, have had run-ins with regulators for nearly a decade. Depending upon which SEC filing one relies on, Barrington itself was founded either in 1991 or 1993. In either case, the two Bettingers were fined by the State of Vermont in 1995 for deceptively advertising that Barrington was an "internationally accredited" institution whose degrees could boost a graduate's lifetime earnings by more than $1 million.
To deal with the accreditation problem, Bettinger Sr. got together with another man in the diploma game, Angel L. Fernandez, and in 1998 they set up an accrediting service, the International Association of Universities and Schools Inc. Both men then promoted it as an accrediting agency for their separate "universities."
For further credentialing, the two men turned next to an individual named Donald Grunewald of Wilton, Conn., who runs his own diploma mill called the "Adam Smith University of America." The mill uses a mailing address and telephone answering service in South Dakota and an Internet server in Liberia.
Grunewald agreed to become the Association's "chairman" and signed his name to an official-looking document by which the Association purported to grant "full accreditation" to Barrington U. Bettinger then posted the credential on the university's Web site while Fernandez placed similar claims of accreditation on the site of his own operation, the so-called American University of Asturias, Spain.
A year later, Spanish authorities shut down Fernandez's operation for issuing degrees illegally under Spanish law. So he packed up his bags and moved to New York, where he began operating all over again, this time under the name InterAmerican University.
By that time, Florida officials had shut down Bettinger and Fernandez's Boca Raton-based Association as well, for failure to pay annual taxes and other fees. Almost immediately thereafter, the Association reopened in Geneva and was back in business.
Last week Grunewald said he hadn't had any dealing with Bettinger or Fernandez in "many, many years." Efforts to locate Fernandez for a comment were unsuccessful, since telephone service to all his known addresses has been terminated.
For his part, Robert Bettinger has been busying himself by marketing Barrington to potential students in China and other Third World nations. His son Steven, 41, heads up Barrington's Amex-listed parent company, Cenuco — which he claims, oddly enough, to be steering into the homeland security business. He did not return a phone call to be interviewed for this story.
OTHER companies in the Post probe include Utah's Ecom Corp., whose chairman and CEO, Craig Cummings, is described in a 2002 SEC filing as possessing a Ph.D. in Electronics and Aeronautical Engineering from Columbia State University.
In fact, Louisiana-based Columbia State, which also turned up on the resumes of board members at three other companies, was actually a diploma mill run by a performing hypnotist named Ronald Pellar, who pleaded guilty in April in Los Angeles to nine counts of federal mail fraud in connection with the school.
The Post probe also found 15 companies with top corporate officials claiming degrees from an entity calling itself "Pacific Western University." One holder of a Pacific Western sheepskin (for a doctorate in "security management") is a retired New York City detective named Anthony Luizzo, who sits on the board of a company called Accufacts Pre-Employment Screening Inc., which conducts security screenings for job applicants. Luizzo says he worked hard for his degree, which took him roughly 18 months of home study to earn.
Yet when it comes to at least the appearance of hard work, he's got nothing on a Clifton, N.J. man named Gene Foley, the CEO of a start-up called Bodyguard Records.com Inc. A 2002 filing describes Foley as possessing a master's and a Ph.D. in political science from "Pacific Western University," and a juris doctor from "Kensington University," all three of which were earned within a year of each other in 1993 and 1994. The Post probe turned up six different companies with top officials boasting diplomas from Kensington U. on their resumes.
The Post investigation also turned up three companies with top officials claiming degrees from "Harrington University." Four SEC reports — filed during a four-month period in 2000 — describe the chairman and CEO of a Tacoma, Wash., software firm called InsynQ, Inc., John P. Gorst, as holding an undergraduate degree from Harrington while pursuing a MBA from the same institution.
Last week, Gorst said he actually had no degrees of any sort, from Harrington or anywhere else, and insisted that he had "no idea at all" how the name of Harrington U. got into InsynQ's SEC filings. "I guess we'll just have to correct it," he said.
* Please send e-mail to: cbyron@nypost.com
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