About fake.degree

What is fake.degree?

fake.degree is a novelty diploma generator. Pick an absurd academic credential, type your name, and receive a printable diploma that looks just official enough to confuse colleagues who don't read closely.

Every degree in our catalog was thoughtfully designed by people who definitely have real degrees from real universities and are not at all bitter about it.

Who is this for?

• Office gag gifts and Secret Santa recipients
• People who have mastered skills that no institution will ever accredit
• Anyone who needs a laugh and 45 seconds to spare
• The 47% of adults who have googled "how to look smart at work"

Is this legal?

Yes. These diplomas are clearly novelties. They are not accredited, not recognized, and should not be submitted to any employer, licensing board, or parent trying to understand what you've been doing with your life. fake.degree makes no representations about educational value, employability, or actual human learning. See our Terms of Service.

Contact

General contact: reach-us@fake.degree

Want real education? Check out Coursera, edX, or Codecademy.

Why this exists

The premise of fake.degree is uncomfortable. The world is full of real institutions handing out real credentials that are themselves only loosely connected to real ability, and on the other end of the same world there is an enormous parallel industry of actual diploma mills selling fraudulent-looking documents to people who intend to use them in fraud. We sit somewhere in the gap between those two facts, telling jokes about both of them. It is not the worst place to be.

Each degree on this site was written by a small team of people who have collectively sat through more academic ceremonies than they would like to admit. The catalog began as a list of disciplines we wished had been offered when we were eighteen, expanded to include the disciplines our friends actually practice in their daily lives without having a name for, and finally settled into its current form, which is the part of that list we could publish without anyone we know personally objecting.

The voice we use

The catalog is deadpan. It treats every absurd discipline with the seriousness of a real university bulletin and then keeps doing so for long enough that the reader begins to wonder, briefly, whether some of the programs might actually exist. This is, in our small way, the point. There is a substantial gap between what we formally recognize as knowledge and what we actually know how to do, and that gap is the whole engine of the joke.

If a reader of this site finishes a degree page feeling slightly less impressed by the next real credential that lands in front of them, we will consider the writing successful. The diploma framed on the wall, like the line on the resume, is mostly a story we have agreed to tell each other. Recognizing the story does not require us to abandon it. It does, however, free us to laugh about it.

What we do not do

We do not sell, ship, or print physical diplomas. Every credential generated on this site is a digital image with a permanent watermark identifying it as a novelty. We do not offer official-looking transcripts, sealed envelopes, or stamped notary pages. We do not partner with any organization that does. If a visitor writes to us asking whether we can produce a diploma without the watermark, the answer is no, in every case, regardless of the explanation offered, including the explanations that mention a sick relative or an elaborate workplace prank.

We also do not maintain a transcript record of anyone's generated diplomas in a way that could be queried by a third party. If your employer writes to us asking to verify a credential issued by fake.degree, we will tell them, plainly, that the credential is a joke. We have done this. We will do it again.

The resume builder

Most visitors to this site are here for the joke diplomas. A smaller and quieter group is here for the resume builder, which is a serious piece of software that we take seriously. It is offered free, without an account, without a paywall, and without any of the gating mechanisms that turn most online resume tools into a slow trickle of upsells.

The decision to put a real working resume builder inside a satire site was deliberate. Many of the people who would most benefit from a clean, plain-text, machine-readable resume are precisely the people who cannot afford the subscription tier that the leading resume tools require for the formatting that actually passes through corporate applicant tracking software. By keeping the builder simple and the output plain, we are making available, for free, the small formatting decisions that turn a resume from one that the machine throws away into one that a human eventually reads.

If you are here for the resume builder and the diplomas distract you, we apologize. They are at the front because they pay for the rest of the site through advertising. The resume builder is the part we are quietly the most proud of.

A note on accreditation

Every degree generated by this site is accredited by the International Board of Imaginary Standards, an organization we made up specifically to provide the accreditation. The board consists of three people who do not exist, holds meetings that do not occur, and publishes minutes that are, by intention, blank. Its sole output is the line of small print at the bottom of each diploma. This is, by any honest reading of the word, no accreditation at all. We mention it here so that no visitor can claim, later, to have been misled.

Domain inquiries

This domain is owned by Nungaa Systems and may be available for transfer to the right operator. If you're interested in acquiring it, write to buy-domain@fake.degree.