Her degree or non-degree is not important. Her TELLING US SHE HAS ONE when she does not have one is what I take issue with.
Exactly. I don’t have a college degree but I’ve never been compelled to lied about having one, even as I know not having one has in some instances put me out of considerations for some jobs I was qualified if not more than qualified for.
The interesting thing is that many people do lie as I found when I was managing both the payroll and accounts payable departments at a publicly traded pharmaceutical department. FWIW, despite not having completed a college degree, I was promoted several times and my last job title there was Senior Staff Accountant. Hard work and common sense can pay off if you can get a foot in the door. So I would never look down my nose at someone else who didn’t finish college or get their degree.
But I once had an accounts payable temp filling in for an open position who I wanted to hire as a full time permanent employee.
When we tentatively offered her the position, she had to fill out an application and agree to a background check. She put down on her application that she had a BA in Business Administration from a small college in upstate NY.
But our HR person was unable to confirm that she ever attended the college let alone had ever gotten a degree. And the HR person and I worked with her for several weeks trying to confirm. She couldn’t provide a copy of her diploma, (and her story changed several times – said she lost it, it was lost in a move, it was burned up in a fire, she didn’t attend her graduation ceremony because her mother was in the hospital at the time, she moved before she could pick up her diploma, it was mailed to her but was lost in the mail, etc.), but again, the college had no record of her ever having attended at all and she told us this was just a mix up or a mistake and that she would contact them, even told us that she would drive to NY, taking a day off and over one weekend to straighten everything out ….but she never did. It was one excuse after another and we had to let her go, let her go from her temp position,
The thing was that the position that we were going to hire her for didn’t require a college degree.
If she hadn’t lied on her application about having obtained a BA, she would have otherwise passed the background check and would have been hired.
Around the same time, we were also hiring for a junior staff accountant position, interviewing many recent graduates and I was on the interview team. We had not one, not two, but three interviewees who we had interviewed a second time thinking they were promising and had them undergo a background checks for a final vetting and all three had lied about obtaining an accounting degree and one had even lied about having obtained an MBA – which was not even a requirement for the job.
Melania is not applying for a job per se, but again she is really.
I would certainly not hold it against her if she didn’t finish college. But I don’t like the untruthfulness. If she did graduate with a degree, that should be easy to prove.
