I just read an online newspaper article that referred to how the area I live in will start cracking down on fake career colleges that charge students thousands of dollars and then deliver phony and in some cases virtually non-existent educations.

The article gave an instance where the newspaper who conducted the investigation had several of their reporters sign up with several of these schools and showed how one received a certification as a support worker after only two weeks of “classes” which basically involved watching DVDs and reading Wikipedia (!) handouts. The other reports posing as a student got one day of training and a certification to work as a security guard.

Fake colleges and universities are nothing new but they continue to exist and continue to charge people money – often thousands of dollars – for fake and phony degrees of certifications.

I worked for a computer training company earlier in my career and we found ourselves often competing with fly-by-night training companies that offered a cheap version of what we were offering and at the time I was working in this industry, we experience several of our “competitors” going out of business and in some cases their former students ended up coming to our company to continue their training.

Typically, they’d tell us about how they’d paid as much if not more money to these now defunct businesses and how they got an inferior product in return. We heard stories about the certifications that they were promised and when we saw the curriculum, we realized it was a joke and nothing to be taken seriously. Unfortunately these poor people had spend time and money and had wasted both.

When searching for education options, I’d stick with legitimate organizations and avoid the fly-by-night ones and ones that give you a bad impression. Often you can visit their website and visit their office in person to get a sense as to what sort of organization you’re dealing with. The computer training company I worked for encouraged people to visit our office and look around the training areas. We also offered people the opportunity to take a $259 class for free to experience things for themselves. We could offer up references that potential students could call themselves, too.

If the school you’re considering won’t do all of this for you before you sign up with them and fork over your money, I’d think twice about investing anything with them.

Mind you, even this doesn’t guarantee anything…the computer training company I worked for ended up filing for bankruptcy 1.5 years after I started with them just as the job was starting to go well for me!

In this case, many people ended up losing money on training that they’d prepaid for, so be careful when you’re prepaying for training that will be offered over a long period of time. Times are tough and even well-established companies are closing.

The only students that had any sort of recourse (I suspect) were those who paid by credit card and might have the opportunity to charge back or at least dispute the charge after the company went out of business since they’d paid for a service that hadn’t been delivered.