BGA: City Colleges of Chicago gives degrees to students without their knowledge

And the education available at these city colleges might actually be worth those non-existent diplomas.

From the Better Government Association:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel often boasts of having "reinvented" City Colleges of Chicago: soaring graduation rates, record numbers of degrees and a community college system transformed into a national model for education reform.

But the glowing portrait is largely an illusion — a crash course in data manipulation that has turned the seven-campus community college system into one where it is easier to get a degree but often more difficult to get an education, a Better Government Association investigation has found.

Since 2010, City Colleges has watered down its curriculum, violated its own rules on what constitutes a degree, changed the way it counts statistics and bestowed thousands of degrees — sometimes in multiples to the same person — to current and former students who in many cases neither requested nor wanted them, the investigation found.