What would be the easiest way for me to get a PhD?
By easiest, I mean a combination of least amount of effort, time and money.
The subject hardly matters, all I need to do is find a hack to have a piece of "official" paper that allow me to add PhD as a title.
For the sake of the exercise, lets assume I live in Western Europe, so the title is somewhat regulated so I can't just go by it online from a diploma mill.
For example https://www.port.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/research-...
Cost is £4,500 and should take less than a year.
If you want a " Professional Doctorate" you can do that in 3 years while working. https://uel.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/prof-doc-information-...
You could get a consulting firm (Monitor, now part of Deloitte) to write it for you like Mohmar Gadaffi's son. Or pay some academic. But those will cost lots of money. You could enroll in a shitty program but there are usually some course and duration requirements, so it will take a while even if standards are low. Or you could just do it, I suppose.
I've seen a few "professional PhDs" I'll see if I can find one. They'd be more expensive too though.
E.g. https://www.waldenu.edu/online-doctoral-programs/doctor-of-b...
I assume that counts as a PhD, there are some other doctoral degrees on there. You could search online for one that matches your repeatability ease requirements, they're all pretty dodgy imo.
For these schools, admissions standards are low — focus is on ability to pay.
If you have academic talent, you can breeze through the coursework and papers. The biggest challenge will be convincing your committee, who probably know very little about your research topic, that your topic is valid.
If you’re not academically inclined, I’m pretty sure you can get someone to take your classes for you and/or write your papers for a relatively low fee (probably lower than tuition).
Do it at a university with low standards. The time and money requirements will be similar, effort required will be lower.
Ideally, it needs to be signed off by an institution that your local passport office accepts. For my latest UK passport, I had to send off the real PhD certificate and it came back within 10 days. My friend (also UK citizen) got his PhD from University of Warsaw and it took months to verify. I am not sure what that process was but the issuer of the PhD is important if you want it legit.
Only my first ever job out of uni checked that I did a PhD there, nowhere else has.
In the UK, the passport appears to be the root ID, so all other renewals check that (driving license is the only other one I've done recently).
I think @edent's answer is best: PhD by publication is best - then bind them together with intro (which can be a survey paper), conclusion and any additional references. I know a Comp Sci PhD did this recently (2016?) at UK uni. Cracking PhD it was too.
https://blog.thegradcafe.com/easiest-phds/
But the people with the most PhDs are centimillionaires who just donate to a school in exchange for an honorary doctorate. Shouldn't take any real work. And since you don't care about ethics, you could probably work out a "PhD now, pay later" arrangement with a big enough promise.
Clarifying question: How much scrutiny does your PhD need to stand up to? It sounds like a "legit" PhD in some utterly useless and inscrutable field of study would be fine.
Obviously, any company interested by someone with a PhD will check at least your subject... and even may have a look at what your work was. So it's not a company requirement to get a job.
So either it's to get a better salary (some companies base their offer on diploma for unexperimented junior)... or it's to pass through some immigration laws (you can work in the country only if you got PhD).
Which one ?
(Anyway, I really think that it's a bad idea: sooner or later you'll be caught... and will lost all that you build)
Many PhD candidates fail to complete the dissertation, and executive PhD programs generally are a lot less stringent in this regard and are designed to make sure you actually finish and designed to be completed on a part time basis. However, you can still get the degree from a reputable university and have a good result.
Such a feat would be pointless because there would be no groundbreaking research to build a business upon, no high h-index, no network created, or pedigree earned by institution and field.
And don't bother with the startup scene because people lacking in work ethic quickly earn a rep and are ignored.
Source: A buddy messing with me partway through my grad school days.