Not sham degrees, exactly. They require the absolute minimum level of educational achievement necessary to edge over the fuzzy line between a diploma mill and legitimate education. Students go to UoP to get a piece of paper that helps their career and that they would generally be incapable of acquiring at a real university, while in exchange UoP is there to milk the students for every federally-guaranteed loan they can qualify for.
Students go to UoP to get a piece of paper that helps their career ... while in exchange UoP is there to milk the students for every federally-guaranteed loan they can qualify for.
However, using Hassan's affiliation with UoP as a means of questioning his qualifications is a bit of a stretch. Given the rate at which bricks and mortar universities churn out graduates with advanced degrees for which there is little employment opportunity on physical campuses, online schools like UoP wind up as the best available option for new MS's and PHD's with an interest in teaching such as Hassan particularly those with one foot in the commercial world.