Corruption in academic accreditation

complaint against the university accuses Susan Xiao-Ping Su, Tri-Valley’s president and founder, of running a scheme that charged students tuition but did not make them attend class. In essence, the complaint says, Ms. Su was selling permission to live and work in the United States on student visas. Ms. Su denies this, and a number of former Tri-Valley students say they were taking classes and believed the university was legitimate.

As Tri-Valley officials discovered, loopholes and vague wording in the rules make it relatively easy for an upstart university to get approval.

While it lacked accreditation, the university says that it met an alternative measure of quality: Its credits were accepted by three other accredited colleges. Federal officials did not find out until more than a year after it approved Tri-Valley in 2009 that two of those three colleges denied ever having had such agreements, the government’s lawsuit says. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials declined to comment on Tri-Valley’s certification, citing the open investigation.)

California lawmakers had allowed a law authorizing a state agency with oversight of for-profit colleges to expire, leaving no one on the ground to monitor Tri-Valley. On a site visit in 2008, federal officials found the college, housed in a pedestrian-looking office, had capacity for about 30 students. By the end of last year, Tri-Valley had enrolled 1,500, the complaint says.

 

The university was able to absorb such a huge number of students, the complaint alleges, by granting them the right to take virtually all of their coursework online, despite a federal regulation that restricts foreign students from taking more than one online course at a time.

The rush of Indian students to such a new college would have raised concerns among American consular officials in India if they had seen a flood of visa requests from admitted Tri-Valley students. But the university exploited a rule that allows students to gain admission to one college, secure a visa, then transfer to another without ever setting foot on the first campus. The Indian government found that only 100 students had been granted visas directly from U.S. Consulates in India to attend Tri-Valley.

The student-visa system or Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), designed to better track foreign students in the United States, was hastily approved as part of the USA Patriot Act following 9/11. In creating SEVIS, lawmakers adopted existing language in which accreditation had never been required for a school