Education verification: how to check degrees and diplomas
Education verification confirms that a claimed qualification — degree, diploma, professional certification — was actually awarded, by a legitimate institution, to this person. It is a standard component of background screening because credential fraud is the easiest resume fraud to commit (a claim about a distant institution, rarely checked) and among the easiest to catch when anyone actually checks.
How degrees are verified
- Through the institution — most universities operate a verification office or online service that confirms enrollment dates and degrees awarded, usually with the graduate’s consent.
- Through national registries — a growing number of countries maintain central degree databases or digital diploma systems queryable by employers or screening services.
- Through screening providers — background-check firms bundle education verification and know each country’s channels; useful for international histories where you do not.
- Never through the certificate alone — a scanned diploma proves possession of a scanned diploma. Verification means the issuer confirms, not the paper.
Diploma mills and how to spot them
The harder fraud is the real-looking certificate from a fake institution: diploma mills sell degrees from entities with university-like names, websites, and even accreditation from equally fictional accreditors. Checks that expose them: the institution appears in the national register of accredited institutions for its claimed country (every country with a higher-education system maintains one); its accreditor is itself recognized; the degree’s timeline is plausible (a bachelor’s completed in four months is an answer in itself); and the institution has a verifiable physical and academic footprint — faculty, programs, history — rather than a website and a payment page.
Professional licenses and certifications
Licenses and professional certifications are usually the easiest credentials to verify — most issuing bodies (medical and pharmacy boards, engineering associations, IT certifiers) run public or on-request registries, and many certificates carry verification codes. They are also where verification matters most: an invented degree misstates education, but an invented pharmacy license is a safety and legal problem on day one. For regulated roles, license verification belongs in the mandatory pre-hire checklist, with expiry dates recorded so currency is tracked after hiring too.
Where education checks fit in hiring
Scope education verification to relevance: the degree that qualifies the role and the licenses the law requires — not every certificate on a twenty-year resume. Run it at the finalist stage alongside employment verification, with the same consent paperwork. And record what was verified: in EmployDB, certifications recorded by verified employers carry their evidence and dates in the employee’s permanent history, and employer-issued training records accumulate the same way — so over a career, an increasing share of a person’s credentials arrive pre-verified, shrinking the checking burden for every future employer.