American Dreams

In late 2015, number of Indian students deported back to India by United state authorities due to possible default of some universities in US. 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.
Why this happened
Indian applicants to Silicon Valley University (SVU) and Northwestern Polytechnic University (NPU) may have paid insufficient attention to some of the oddities of the admissions process of these two universities. For example, an advertisement placed by NPU noted that its minimum Grade Point Average requirement was 3.0, which is 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. These universities also offered “part-time and evening/weekend programmes” which reignite the debate on immigration amidst fears of Americans losing jobs to foreigners. While , some students on Optional Practical Training tend to work in unrelated fields and apply for H-1B visas that permit such work, actions that contradict the rules.
But on the other side, U.S.’s consular missions in India is also responsible for this situation by not assessing these visa applicants through the same lens that the CBP(Customs and Border Protection) and why have U.S. consulates in India been dishing out visas if CBP has been denying applicants entry at the other end, is still question to be answered.
Exploiting loopholes
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. 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(Department of Homeland Security) to become the gatekeeper for higher education, and in doing so it sidelined the DOE, though it was the better candidate for the job. In case of University quality, there is 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.
Indian students are paying high price for the weaknesses pointed out by U.S. Government Accountability Office. 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”.

By: Vishal