Split worthy?: Worthless Foreign Degree

Worthless Foreign Degree was conceived as, and is currently described as that situation where an immigrant has a job well below their actual skill/education level because the accreditations they earned in their home country are no use in getting them a job in their new country. The alt title In Old Country I Was Physicist makes this clearer.

The title Worthless Foreign Degree is ambiguous enough that it can refer just as easily to this other situation which has appeared in some examples— a native born citizen working in their own country has a degree from an obscure school in another country, the implication being that their qualifications are dubious, as the foreign school may well be a diploma mill or otherwise worthless.

The question is whether this situation, which currently has only three examples on the wiki and one that I've yet to add, warrants being split off into its own trope, and if so, what to do about the trope names? Examples follow:

• This is the reason Jeff from Community has to go back to college: turns out his law degree wasn't from Columbia, but from Colombia.
• Frasier. After Dr. Schachter gives the Crane brothers a virulent "The Reason You Suck" Speech regarding their Sibling Rivalry [...], the boys agree on his prognosis, but then use his degrees as an Ad Hominem argument to ignore his advice, even though they admit Martin says the same exact thing, and kick him out of the building!

—->Frasier: Well, there's no arguing with Dr. Schachter's credentials. My God, the man is an expert in his field. He graduated from the University of... Grenada!
—->Niles: [shocked] Well, surely that was just his undergraduate schooling.
—->Frasier: Oh yes, of course, his graduate work was done in... Aruba!
—->Niles: An all-Caribbean schooling... well, tally me banana!

• Thirty Rock— Dr. Spaceman's Vietnamese medical degree.
• From The Closer episode "To Serve With Love":

—->Brenda: If you meant to kill Mr. Hirschbaum, the fact that you only killed Scott Esposito is immaterial in the eyes of the law.
—->Doyle: Really?
—->Det. Gabriel: Did you actually go to law school?
—->Doyle: Yes I went to law school— the very best the Caribbean had to offer!

edited 9th Aug '11 11:30:03 AM by Tongpu

Good point, The old name did make it clearer. Until I looked at the page,I assumed that Worthless Foreign Degree was just that: degrees from foreign institutions that are worthless.

And I know that there are more than three or four examples.

I'd say change the name on the current WFD to something clearer, and YKTTW "Foreign degrees that are worthless" to get more examples.

edited 9th Aug '11 12:43:00 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Seconded. Definitely split worthy: those two tropes tell very different stories,

The Quiet One. No OTT. No unfunny. No squick. No crusades. Harmless and clean.

Nth split. I can think of an example, if it's not there already, Magic Time involving a doctor selling hotdogs.

Fight smart, not fair.

Bump. Page action crowner here.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And even if it is broke, just ignore it and maybe it'll be sort of OK — like the environment."

Split, yes. But "degree which is worthless because it's from a junk school in a foreign country" doesn't seem different enough from "degree which is worthless because it's from a junk school" to merit its own trope, so I'd suggest making the new trope cover the more general case.

Calling someone a pedant is an automatic Insult Backfire. Real pedants will be flattered.

Good point. Any name suggestions to accompany a YKTTW?

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And even if it is broke, just ignore it and maybe it'll be sort of OK — like the environment."

Maybe a better split would be Worthless Degree split from Doctor In Russia Taxi Driver New York, or something shorter for the second that gets the same point across.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Foreign Degrees Dont Count?

Fight smart, not fair.

It's not always that the degree is bad. In fact, it's rarely about the degree at all. Sometimes it's just too expensive to get relicensed or sometimes it's just never explained. In True Blood there's a stripper who offhand comments that "In Russia I was a Cardiologist." But there's never any more depth into why she's a stripper now as in most cases.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Is there any problem with "In Old Country I Was Physicist"? Seems to get the point across rather well.

Yeah, unwritten rule number one: follow all the unwritten procedures. - Camacan

It's a dialog title and we're trying to steer away from those because they tend to get horribly misused.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Yeah, I guess there's no need to reinvent the wheel: Worthless Degree would work for the "school with no credibility" variant.

For legitimate foreign degrees, maybe Cabbie With A Doctorate or Doctor In The Old Country?

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And even if it is broke, just ignore it and maybe it'll be sort of OK — like the environment."

Cabbie With A Doctorate or Cabbie With A Foreign Ph D.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Actually, yeah, we should be sure to include "foreign" so it doesn't sound like a random doctor who became an underachiever. So, not Cabbie With A Doctorate but Cabbie With A Foreign Doctorate, or Foreign Ph D, as you suggested.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And even if it is broke, just ignore it and maybe it'll be sort of OK — like the environment."

Like Cabbie With A Forign Ph D.

Fight smart, not fair.