A Cat Once Earned an MBA With a 3.5 GPA

Colby Nolan's resume had the tidy little lies of a sting operation: baby-sitting, retail management, enough life experience to sound plausible if nobody looked too closely. The applicant himself could not type it. He was a six-year-old black cat belonging to a Pennsylvania deputy attorney general.

In 2004, investigators paid $299 to get Colby Nolan an online degree from Trinity Southern University. The school allegedly turned the cat's fake work history into an MBA transcript with coursework and a 3.5 GPA.

Investigators first bought Colby a bachelor's degree, then watched Trinity Southern decide that his resume qualified him for a master of business administration degree. An Associated Press report carried by NBC News said the school offered no classes and still produced a transcript for the cat, complete with listed coursework and grades.^[1]

On December 16, 2004, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott's office won a temporary restraining order and asset freeze against Trinity Southern. The state described a Dallas-based for-profit university selling bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees for $300 to $500, based on a student's own claims about skills and experience.^[2] The pitch was almost proud of its emptiness: no classes to attend, no tests to take.

In March 2005, Texas obtained judgments against Craig B. Poe and Alton S. Poe, the brothers linked to Trinity Southern. The orders barred the defendants from marketing fraudulent or substandard degree programs as accredited education.^[3] Colby was comic evidence aimed at a serious target. A fake university could turn vanity, desperation, or professional anxiety into a certificate official enough to fool someone busy.

George the cat repeated the trick in Britain when a BBC investigation presented a certificate from a nonexistent society and got him registered with three hypnotherapy organizations.^[4] Zoe D. Katze had done a version of it in the United States, where psychologist Steven Eichel told CBS News that an application and a doctored resume were enough to get his cat certified by the American Psychotherapy Association.^[5] The animal served as the audit.

Colby's paws made the polite explanations harder to keep. Maybe a human applicant exaggerated. Maybe a clerk missed one detail. Maybe a strange work history still deserves a chance. A cat with a business degree forces the simpler question: if the process cannot notice the species of the candidate, what is the diploma measuring besides payment, formatting, and trust in official-looking paper?

Somewhere in the paperwork was a transcript funnier than any consumer warning. The absurdity did work that a dry memo could not. A black cat had retail management experience, a GPA better than many humans, and proof of a scam you could hold up in court.

A Cat Once Earned an MBA With a 3.5 GPA

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