It’s a back to school special like you’ve never seen before - Marketplace exposes the big business of fake degrees. While real students return to the classroom spending years studying to get real degrees from real universities, Marketplace scores a PHD in weeks. We get our very own fake transcripts with a list of bogus courses we never attended, and best of all: a 3.92 GPA. Plus when you call up our phony school, there’s a fake receptionist vouching for us. It’s the latest way to pad your resume.

As bachelor degrees become more common and job competition heats up, experts estimate that up to half of all new American PHDs are fake.

So just how widespread is the deception in Canada? We obtain a secret list of about 800 Canadians who could have bought a degree from the world’s largest diploma mill in Pakistan. Engineers, legal clerks, CEOs, politicians, teachers...

In this episode, we investigate counsellors treating serious mental health conditions: childhood trauma, suicide, ADHD, and PTSD. They have fake degrees, but will their counselling feel real? Our undercover producers record treatment sessions and then we get them analyzed by a psychologist. Reviewing our bizarre visits, the expert concludes they're “inappropriate”, with "boundary violations”. We also track down a college professor with a fake degree. How did his phoney credentials not get spotted by the schools?