You Deserve a Prestigious Degree

A short introduction from the registrar's office

Every degree on this site was written by the same small editorial team and is offered without entrance examinations, prerequisites, or any of the usual gatekeeping mechanisms that real universities employ to manage their applicant pools. We do not require letters of recommendation. We do not require a personal essay. We do not require the small fee that most schools quietly charge to process an application that they have already decided to reject. We do not require anything except your name, which we will print on the diploma exactly as you typed it, with middle initials honored, accent marks preserved, and capital letters rendered with the kind of stately spacing that hand-engraved diplomas use for emphasis.

The catalog grows when we find a new discipline that the world is honestly practicing without yet recognizing as a discipline. Procrastination Science was among the first programs we accredited and remains one of the most consistently enrolled. Cat Video Analysis emerged from a single faculty meeting in which two members argued, in good faith, for an entire afternoon, about whether a particular video constituted a single text or a corpus. Synergy is the program whose graduates most often request a second diploma, usually because they have framed the first one and would like to give the second to a parent. We do not ask why. We print and we move on.

Behind the jokes there is a small and somewhat serious idea about credentials. The line on a resume that lists a school and a degree is, by a considerable margin, the most heavily relied-on shortcut in the modern hiring pipeline. We treat that line as if it carries information about ability, character, and future productivity, when in fact it mostly carries information about which eighteen-year-old version of the candidate had the time and the family resources to attend a four-year residential institution. The diploma is a proxy. Most proxies fail in interesting ways. We laugh at our diplomas because laughing is one of the few legitimate responses to a proxy that has gradually become more important than the thing it was supposed to proxy.

You will not find, on this site, a serious argument that credentials should be abolished. They will not be abolished. Too much of the working world is organized around them, and the alternatives, which mostly involve trusting the hiring manager's instincts about who reminds them of themselves, are considerably worse. What you will find here is the quieter argument that the credential is just a story we tell about people, and that the people who benefit most from the story are not always the people who deserve the most benefit. The fake diploma is the story rendered visible. Print one. Frame it. Notice how the visual grammar does most of the work.