Sham US universities expose student visa scams

Nirupama Rao urges Clinton to view the case ‘in totality’:

US: A case working its way through a federal court in California has exposed huge student visa scams by “sham” universities cashing in on Indians and other foreigners looking for a quick path to jobs in the United States.

Enrollment at Tri-Valley University, an unaccredited self-styled Christian graduate school, surged from a handful of students to 1,500, almost all from India, in a two-year period before federal authorities shut it down in January.

The university’s president, Susan Su, was arrested in May and charged with fraud, money laundering, harboring aliens and making false statements. Four others also have been charged in the case.

She is accused of submitting false documentation to get federal approval to sponsor students to the university on foreign visas, and then using it to sell visas to all comers for the price of tuition, $2,700 a semester. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Wednesday called it “a pretty horrible visa scam, where a fake university petitioned and got visas for a bunch of students to come over and then actually turned out not to be a real educational institution.”

The case, which has yet to go to trial, has strained relations with India, whose press has portrayed the students as innocent victims suddenly at loose ends and under threat of deportation, their dreams dashed by the scam.

India’s ambassador to the United States, Nirupama Rao, this week wrote US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the case, citing the hardships faced by the students and urging that their cases “be viewed in their totality with understanding and in a fair and reasonable manner,” the embassy said.

Nuland said 435 of the students have been approved to be allowed to transfer to other universities, but the status of more than 900 others is still in doubt. “Some students we’re not going to be able place, but we’re continuing to work on this issue,” she said.

The TVU case comes at a time when many American colleges are eager to recruit students from India, where a burgeoning middle class and growing population is powering demand for higher education.

In 2009-2010, there were 105,000 Indian students in the United States, about 15 percent of the total international students here, according to a report by the Institute of International Education. Only China, with 128,000, had more.

But even with the rush for foreign students, TVU was unusual in that it had only foreign students, 95 percent of them from India. It operated from a building in Pleasanton, California that had capacity for only 30 students when it opened in 2008, and yet the university grew by hundreds of students in its second year, according to court filings.

As the school’s enrollment surged, Su bought a new Mercedes-Benz and a 1.8 million dollar home in Silicon Valley with the estimated 3.2 million dollars that flooded in, the government said.

There were other signs that something was amiss - a university website rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, sketchy course listings, many of them taught by none other than the school’s president and CEO, Susan Su.

When DHS agents finally raided the school they found that most of its students were dispersed around the country, holding jobs under the visa program’s work-study provisions.

The residence where the university said more than half its students were living turned out to be a single apartment, according to the filings.

Washington,Sunday, AFP