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D for Deportation
In an eerie echo of years past, recent months have witnessed a spurt in deportations of aspiring Indian students seeking entry into two California universities — NPU and Silicon Valley University (SVU), institutions that appear to have come under the scanner of education accreditation authorities.
December 18 was “D-Day” for students travelling to the U.S. with I-20 visas issued by NPU and SVU, and it marked the beginning of mass deportations from the Bay Area to Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport. By mid-January, 2016, a total of 387 students who went through immigration in Hyderabad airport were detained at various points of entry in the U.S. including in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago, and deported back to India.
Behind the numbers hides a human story of academic dreams crumbling on faraway shores, and of lives and hopes of ordinary, middle-class families broken despite parents coughing up hefty fees for their starry-eyed children. On the flip side, a series of fatal flaws in the regulation of American higher education appear to have been a root cause of this man-made catastrophe.
Seeking a job, or an education?
Consider first all that went wrong on Indian soil. A review of the evidence from conversations that The Hindu had with deported students in Telangana suggests that Indian applicants to NPU and SVU may have paid insufficient attention to some of the oddities of the admissions process of these two universities.
For example, what strikes the eye in an advertisement placed by NPU is that its minimum Grade Point Average requirement, 3.0, is substantially lower than that prescribed by most of India’s central universities.
Similarly NPU states that clearing the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is an admissions requirement, even though it does not say what the passing score is.
Digging deeper into the structure of universities’ programmes, a pattern emerges suggesting that admissions may be on offer for more than just their academic value.
NPU, for instance, boasts options for “part-time an evening/weekend programmes” even as it does not specify whether this is open for international students.
Students currently stationed in the two universities with whom The Hindu still has contact, are certain that they can sustain themselves with the 20 hours of Curricular Practical Training that permits curriculum related work on campus.
Probing deeper, however, it was evident that the students do not only work on campus but at gas stations, retail outlets and even restaurants as part of “CPT” to earn a quick buck ranging between $8-$14, a fact that would be fuel to reignite the debate on immigration amidst fears of Americans losing jobs to foreigners.
When their course of study ends the F1-visa holders are permitted to stay back in the country for one year of Optional Practical Training that allows them to work, and per regulations such work must relate to their field of study, and must be a full-time job with any employer.
Yet an official from the U.S.-India Educational Foundation confided off the record that with institutional aid some students on OPT tend to work in unrelated fields and apply for H-1B visas that permit such work.
Understanding U.S. deportations
Nevertheless the approach of CBP towards deportations suggests that there may have been guidance from the top that they need to watch out for Andhra and Telangana students heading to NPU and SVU.
Surprising though it may seem that CBP has such a “policy,” it is consistent with a 2013 report inThe Hindu which noted that “global intelligence” and “non-verbal communication” signals were very much a part of the arsenal used by immigration officers monitoring the long lines of travellers at most U.S. airports.
The CBP officers gave The Hindu an example of this – when the Spanish economy plummeted during the worst of the 2008 global economic downturn, CBP noted an uptick in the number of would-be immigrants from that country – and not all of them had the right documentation, which likely meant there may have been a similar spike in deportation numbers.
Exploiting loopholes
While it is not clear yet how any potential investigation of NPU and SVU by immigration authorities may evolve, the cases of Tri-Valley and Herguan demonstrate that there are two loopholes in the U.S. regulation of university admissions for international students that are vulnerable to exploitation: first, the wrong government agency may be doing the regulator’s job; and second, there is a lack of sophistication in the way regulators are assessing university quality.
On the first point, it is telling that the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), a repository of expertise in assessing education quality, is not charged with regulating university admissions and this may well be setting the system up for failure.
The roots of this institutional idiosyncrasy go back to the U.S. Patriot Act of 2001, under whose shadow it became imperative to monitor the gates into higher education in the U.S. to prevent potential terrorists from entering the homeland under the guise of academic pursuit, as indeed at least one of the 9/11 suspects did. The George W. Bush administration consequently empowered the DHS to become the gatekeeper for higher education, and in doing so it sidelined the DOE, though it was the better candidate for the job.
Regarding the second question of university quality, the Bush years also witnessed the birth of the Student and Exchange Visitor Programme (SEVP) and its monitoring tool, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). While the purpose of these systems was to reform the way international student visas were granted, ironically it was through SEVIS that the now-convicted heads of Tri-Valley and Herguan were able to supply Indian recruiters with a superabundance of I-20 forms, the basis on which a student entry visa is ultimately issued by U.S. consulates and embassies abroad.
The 2011 CHE investigation explained why Indian students paid a high price for the weaknesses pointed out by U.S. Government Accountability Office, arguing that some conniving university bosses realised that “India is ripe for exploiting SEVIS loopholes, in part because of the sheer number of students there who want to come to the U.S.,” and Indians were receptive to these pitches by rogue recruiters back home because “although the country has a burgeoning middle class, many of its students still need to work to afford an American university degree”.
Indians in American Universities: The American Dream and the enigma of departure - The Hindu
In an eerie echo of years past, recent months have witnessed a spurt in deportations of aspiring Indian students seeking entry into two California universities — NPU and Silicon Valley University (SVU), institutions that appear to have come under the scanner of education accreditation authorities.
December 18 was “D-Day” for students travelling to the U.S. with I-20 visas issued by NPU and SVU, and it marked the beginning of mass deportations from the Bay Area to Hyderabad’s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport. By mid-January, 2016, a total of 387 students who went through immigration in Hyderabad airport were detained at various points of entry in the U.S. including in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Chicago, and deported back to India.
Behind the numbers hides a human story of academic dreams crumbling on faraway shores, and of lives and hopes of ordinary, middle-class families broken despite parents coughing up hefty fees for their starry-eyed children. On the flip side, a series of fatal flaws in the regulation of American higher education appear to have been a root cause of this man-made catastrophe.
Seeking a job, or an education?
Consider first all that went wrong on Indian soil. A review of the evidence from conversations that The Hindu had with deported students in Telangana suggests that Indian applicants to NPU and SVU may have paid insufficient attention to some of the oddities of the admissions process of these two universities.
For example, what strikes the eye in an advertisement placed by NPU is that its minimum Grade Point Average requirement, 3.0, is substantially lower than that prescribed by most of India’s central universities.
Similarly NPU states that clearing the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is an admissions requirement, even though it does not say what the passing score is.
Digging deeper into the structure of universities’ programmes, a pattern emerges suggesting that admissions may be on offer for more than just their academic value.
NPU, for instance, boasts options for “part-time an evening/weekend programmes” even as it does not specify whether this is open for international students.
Students currently stationed in the two universities with whom The Hindu still has contact, are certain that they can sustain themselves with the 20 hours of Curricular Practical Training that permits curriculum related work on campus.
Probing deeper, however, it was evident that the students do not only work on campus but at gas stations, retail outlets and even restaurants as part of “CPT” to earn a quick buck ranging between $8-$14, a fact that would be fuel to reignite the debate on immigration amidst fears of Americans losing jobs to foreigners.
When their course of study ends the F1-visa holders are permitted to stay back in the country for one year of Optional Practical Training that allows them to work, and per regulations such work must relate to their field of study, and must be a full-time job with any employer.
Yet an official from the U.S.-India Educational Foundation confided off the record that with institutional aid some students on OPT tend to work in unrelated fields and apply for H-1B visas that permit such work.
Understanding U.S. deportations
Nevertheless the approach of CBP towards deportations suggests that there may have been guidance from the top that they need to watch out for Andhra and Telangana students heading to NPU and SVU.
Surprising though it may seem that CBP has such a “policy,” it is consistent with a 2013 report inThe Hindu which noted that “global intelligence” and “non-verbal communication” signals were very much a part of the arsenal used by immigration officers monitoring the long lines of travellers at most U.S. airports.
The CBP officers gave The Hindu an example of this – when the Spanish economy plummeted during the worst of the 2008 global economic downturn, CBP noted an uptick in the number of would-be immigrants from that country – and not all of them had the right documentation, which likely meant there may have been a similar spike in deportation numbers.
Exploiting loopholes
While it is not clear yet how any potential investigation of NPU and SVU by immigration authorities may evolve, the cases of Tri-Valley and Herguan demonstrate that there are two loopholes in the U.S. regulation of university admissions for international students that are vulnerable to exploitation: first, the wrong government agency may be doing the regulator’s job; and second, there is a lack of sophistication in the way regulators are assessing university quality.
On the first point, it is telling that the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), a repository of expertise in assessing education quality, is not charged with regulating university admissions and this may well be setting the system up for failure.
The roots of this institutional idiosyncrasy go back to the U.S. Patriot Act of 2001, under whose shadow it became imperative to monitor the gates into higher education in the U.S. to prevent potential terrorists from entering the homeland under the guise of academic pursuit, as indeed at least one of the 9/11 suspects did. The George W. Bush administration consequently empowered the DHS to become the gatekeeper for higher education, and in doing so it sidelined the DOE, though it was the better candidate for the job.
Regarding the second question of university quality, the Bush years also witnessed the birth of the Student and Exchange Visitor Programme (SEVP) and its monitoring tool, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). While the purpose of these systems was to reform the way international student visas were granted, ironically it was through SEVIS that the now-convicted heads of Tri-Valley and Herguan were able to supply Indian recruiters with a superabundance of I-20 forms, the basis on which a student entry visa is ultimately issued by U.S. consulates and embassies abroad.
The 2011 CHE investigation explained why Indian students paid a high price for the weaknesses pointed out by U.S. Government Accountability Office, arguing that some conniving university bosses realised that “India is ripe for exploiting SEVIS loopholes, in part because of the sheer number of students there who want to come to the U.S.,” and Indians were receptive to these pitches by rogue recruiters back home because “although the country has a burgeoning middle class, many of its students still need to work to afford an American university degree”.
Indians in American Universities: The American Dream and the enigma of departure - The Hindu