News Investigates Shady University

News Investigates Shady University

In the quickest summary, what did you uncover? A school in California that is made up of 99% foreign students and has in fact become one of the country's largest importers of foreign students. The university, they were very afraid that students who weren't doing well academically would have to leave the country and leave the school, which would cost them a lot of money. Is that good? There was this insane story in the Indian media last year

that a lot of the students trying to come to this college were being blocked from boarding airplanes and turned back at customs. We started doing some digging. We were able to find this amazing trove of documents that gave us this inside look at the university and its financials and what the administrators were up to. I uncovered an institutionalized system of changing grades, making it impossible for students to fail classes. The school was almost entirely controlled by one family that's reaped some pretty serious benefits, even though technically it's a nonprofit college.
The university doesn't spend a lot on educating its students, but it does spend a lot of money on paying recruiters in India to bring the students in for them. They spent over a million dollars on these recruiters who advertise the school and in return they get a portion of the students' tuition. Days when the school's accreditor came to visit, the school set up this elaborate Potemkin village of a university. They instructed their teachers who are in fact part time to say that they worked full time at the university and sit in offices. There was also a period where the school didn't have a librarian and they brought in a librarian from outside, from a different university to sit at the desk. What's really messed up and crazy is that even though the president and his second in command have multimillion dollar houses owned by the university, they spend almost nothing on educating their students. It also points to this very big weakness in our accreditation system. Our evidence suggests they're maybe not doing their job, even when confronted with evidence of pretty serious wrongdoing.