Archive for the ‘Student Visa for US’ Category
No change in visa policy towards Indian students: US
The US has said that there is no change in its policy towards issuing visas to Indian students. “I don’t think we’ve changed our policy with regard to the way we interview applicants,” State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters at her daily news conference.
“I think what we are doing is making sure that the sponsoring organisations truly are what they say they are in the United States; that if they say that they are bringing students over to educate them, that they intend to educate them, not put them to work, et cetera,” she said.
Nuland said the US supports the recent initiative of opening community colleges in India on the pattern of those here. Last week, education ministers of four Indian States – Punjab, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir, visited several US cities to have a first hand experience of the community colleges here.
“Well, obviously, we support this initiative. We have been working with the Indian side to flesh out the initiative that was agreed between the President and the Prime Minister through our Education Bureau here. And obviously, we are responsible for the visa issuance for the various folks studying in the United States,” Nuland said.
Visa curbs reducing GMAT applicants
Half of Indians, who appeared for GMAT in 2011, were in the 25-30 age group, up from 45% in 2007. The Asian Geographical Trend Report for GMAT examinees, however, did not see any alarm in the Indian numbers, saying, “Although lower than the TY (test year) 2009 peak, GMAT testing in India has now stabilized and showed new signs of growth during the second half of 2011.”
Indian analysts saw the trend in the context of reasonsranging from a slowing economy to a greater choice of exams. A high 64% of Chinese applicants last year were women in contrast to India, where females constituted only 25% of the examinees. Analysing the drop in Indian applicants, IIM-Ahmedabad Director Prof. S K Barua suggested several factors like visa restrictions imposed by the US and even a backlash against students being targeted in Australia in recent years.
Prof. Barua also attributed the trend to caution arising from a slowing economy in India. “The Indian economy has not being doing well which would make people wary of taking a break from a reasonably good job to appear for GMAT,” he said. AICTE Chairman Dr. S S Mantha said students now had the option of a choice of exams including CAT, CMAT and MAT which could be a reason for flagging appeal. “Several states take CMAT scores so only students who are clearly opting for a college overseas sit for the test,” he added.
Source: The Times of India, April 15, 2012
300 Tri-Valley students may be sent home
Up to 300 students, a majority of them Indian, are likely to be sent home after United States immigration authorities spent more than nine months investigating the Tri-Valley University (TVU) visa fraud case. Following a meeting held on Friday between Indian officials and their U.S. counterparts at the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Indian Embassy said that more than a thousand students were being considered for transfer to other universities.
Of these 435 transfers have already been approved, 145 have been denied and “about an equal number” were issued with Notices of Intention to Deny (NOID). NOIDs had been issued to the students based on a preliminary examination of the documentation and other circumstances pertaining to the individual students’ cases, sources told The Hindu.
The idea of issuing a NOID was to give students some time to respond as required. U.S. officials have advised that students who have received NOIDs should “reply to the notices in the stipulated time with required and additional information or documents.” This would put the total number of students likely to be told that they had to leave the U.S. in the vicinity of 300. The remaining transfer application cases, another 300 or more in number, were said to still be under examination.
In terms of the progress of the investigation since then, U.S. officials said that the cases of students that have been examined were considered individually “after evaluating all the information provided by the students.” However no timeframe has been provided for wrapping all the cases, although 600-odd cases were said to have been covered in the last six months. Sources said that students who were denied visa and returned to India would not face any restrictions against reapplying for another student, or I-20, visa, adding that in the case of those who re-applied their application would be considered afresh without prejudice to their earlier denial of transfer visa from TVU.
However it is not yet clear whether any formal or written assurances to this effect will be given to the students. This may be a concern because there are some legal circumstances under which students returning to India and reapplying for an I-visa may face a risk of denial based on their past association with the TVU case. The Notice to Appear is a case in point. “Once you leave [the U.S.] after an Notice to Appear is issued, you are automatically considered to be self-deported. After self-deportation you are subject to a minimum five-year ban from re-entering the U.S,” as immigration specialist Attorney Sheela Murthy said. While an NTA is different from a NOID, a written assurance to students may assuage concerns regarding possible debarment from re-entry under a NOID too.
Sources also noted that the process with regard to NOIDs would be that after receipt of the notice the student in question would be required to respond to notice, following which they would get a further intimation as to whether their case has been considered or denied. If denied, the source said, students would have recourse within the framework of U.S. law, possibly entailing the pursuit of justice in a court of law. The case of TVU near the San Francisco area in California came to light in January this year when a sting operation led by ICE closed in on a major visa fraud network run by Susan Xiao-Ping Su (41), then the head of the University.
At the time ICE issued a notice of forfeiture of properties of Su. However with over 95 per cent of the students involved said to be of Indian origin, and a majority from Andhra Pradesh, it was evident that many hundreds of them might be left in legal limbo, facing the prospect of being “removed” and, before that, the humiliation of wearing a radio tag for monitoring. In May, Su was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of visa fraud and money laundering. After last week’s meeting sources also said most of the earlier cases of radio tags had already been cleared and the last six months had seen no new instances of radio tagging. So it was quite likely that there are very few tags on students at this time, if any.
Reflecting on the room for discretion available to U.S. immigration authorities in adjudicating on individual cases, the Indian embassy said that at the meeting on Friday it had sought to impress upon U.S. officials that “the Indian students of TVU have undergone hardship since the closure of the University and that their cases should be viewed with understanding.” In a statement the embassy added that it was continuing its efforts with U.S. authorities aimed at addressing the plight of TVU students.
Source: The Hindu, October 23, 2011
Immigration fraud by US colleges causing worries once again
It’s that time of the year when hundreds of students from India pack their bags to go and join colleges and universities in the US. And though, like previous years, there has been an increase in the number of Indians going to campuses in the US, two incidents of raids by US immigration authorities on colleges for fraudulent practices, which involved a large number of Indian students, in the past few months are causing concern.
Early this year, in January, US immigration authorities raided Tri-Valley University in California, alleging that the school’s founder and president, Susan Xiao-Ping Su, was issuing US student visas to foreign nationals willing to pay for them. Over 95% of Tri-Valley’s 1,500 students were from India, and the institution listed out the same address for over half of them. Later, in July, the University of Northern Virginia too was raided by the US law enforcement authorities on grounds of alleged visa fraud and here too, hundreds of the students were from India.
These two cases appear to be just the tip of the iceberg, and most immigration lawyers and experts in the US now feel that more and more such dubious colleges and universities will come under the scanner of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). And it is well-known that a large number of students in such institutions are from India, particularly from Andhra Pradesh.
More Raids Likely
A recent article in the influential The Chronicle of Higher Education in the US suggests that Tri-Valley is only the beginning and there are many other colleges, most of them unaccredited, which are exploiting byzantine federal regulations, enrolling almost exclusively foreign students and charging them upward of $3,000 for a chance to work in the US.
“They flourish in California and Virginia, where regulations are lax, and many of their practices – for instance, holding some classes on only three weekends per semester – are unconventional, to say the least. These colleges usher in thousands of foreign students and generate millions of dollars in profits because they have the power, bestowed by the US government, to help students get visas,” the Chronicle article said.
During a trip to India last month, Reta Jo Lewis, the special representative for global intergovernmental affairs with the state department, said the DHS had the lead on many more universities in the US, which were guilty of such fraudulent practices.
Misuse of Student Visas
Immigration experts in India and in the US point out that the modus operandi among Indian students who are flouting rules follows a common pattern. In most of the cases, the I-20 form, which is required for a student visa, is issued by a different college, than the one the students finally land up in. The easy transfer norms are made use of by professionals from India who are mostly headed to the US to look for work. In most cases, they are not young students and the sham universities facilitate their illegal stay in the US in exchange for huge amounts of money.
“Genuine students from India, who are aiming to study in the US, should expand their consideration set of potential institutions beyond traditional top institutions as suggested by rankings. However, they should also recognise that there is a wide spectrum of quality of institutions ranging from Harvard University to Tri-Valley University. The key is to make informed choices and treat any short-cuts promised by ‘study abroad’ agents or institutions with caution. Students should make sure that the institution they plan to study in is listed in the US Department of Education’s website and preferably accredited by one of the six regional accrediting agencies,” says Rahul Choudaha, director of development & innovation, World Education Services, New York.
Even as the US embassy in Delhi has recently announced a 20% increase in the number of student visa applications this year in India from a year ago, there have also been warnings against lack of physical attendance at colleges in the US, failure to maintain full course-load and unauthorised employment. Many student visa applicants felt that there were more questions asked at interviews at the embassy and consulates this year and the process of getting an F1 student visa took longer than previous years.
Part I: Varsity Blues – Did they make an educated choice?
When US federal authorities raided the University of Northern Virginia (UNVA) in a Washington suburb on 28 July for suspected visa fraud and slapped a notice of intent to withdraw its licence to admit foreigners, its predominantly Indian student community was portrayed in the media as innocent victims of an unscrupulous, profit-pursuing institution. UNVA, 90% of whose 2,400 students were Indians and mainly from Andhra Pradesh, was the second American university with a large concentration of Indian students to be raided this year.
In January, California-based Tri-Valley University (TVU), another unaccredited school where a majority of students were Indians, was raided and shut down by immigration and customs enforcement officials for alleged immigration fraud. Federal officials forced Indian students of TVU to wear radio-tracking devices on their ankles to monitor their movements—a move that raised outrage back home.
Interviews with former UNVA and TVU students, and postings on the Internet and social networking sites and forums, indicate that students may have intentionally selected these universities, preferring schools known to be lax in marking attendance, with extensive online coursework, and questionable use of “curricular practical training”, or CPT, a form of work authorization available in select programmes of study that enabled them to work longer hours in off-campus, part-time jobs.
In UNVA community discussion forums on the social network Orkut, students were more inquisitive about the varsity’s leniency in allowing students to work full-time outside the campus—an activity prohibited on a US student visa.
A closer look at similarities between UNVA and TVU, and additional evidence unearthed during investigations by US newspapers, indicate that rather than being exceptions, such schools may be part of a growing number of unaccredited, for-profit colleges of questionable educational quality that make money from international student demand to work full-time in the US by exploiting loopholes in regulations governing student visa use.
“I don’t think these guys were misled or they didn’t know such kind of stuff,” said Narayanan Ramaswamy, executive director, education services, at KPMG Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd.
“It’s this fascination for US, US education and the peer pressure that it creates that led them to this situation. If somebody is knowledgeable enough to go to foreign universities for studying, they would definitely know how to check the background of an institute and check with multiple people,” he said.
A growing racket?
In the official complaint filed against TVU, the Department of Homeland Security accused Susan Xiao-Ping, the school’s founder, of participating in an “illegal scheme to defraud the United States” by obtaining permission to sponsor and admit foreign students and “fraudelently issuing visa-related documents to aliens in exchange for tuition and fees”. Additional transgressions included the alleged falsification of student attendance records and transcripts, submitting false information regarding students’ residences, means of support 
and courses of study.
The Student Exchange Visitor Programe (SEVP) certification of UNVA that was temporarily put on hold on 28 July was, however, restored on 11 August, according to a document posted on the university’s website. UNVA officials did not respond to telephone calls and emails from this newspaper.
Central to the business model of TVU was its apparent misuse of CPT, a form of temporary work authorization issued to F-1 (student) visa holders under certain circumstances. Such students are permitted to take full-time paid internships, cooperative education, and paid practicum so long as these are an “integral part of an established curriculum and… directly related to the student’s major area of study”.
Students in mainstream universities generally only qualify for CPT after they have completed one full year of study in programmes that require hands-on, for-credit work experience for graduation—such as nursing and medical programmes, teachers’ certification programmes or courses in clinical psychology. However, many of the students from both TVU and UNVA were using CPT soon after enrolment, according to student interviews and discussions by students on online forums.
One online consulting company, StudyAbroadPlus, advertises a vast array of “paid internships” for various US Master’s programmes in positions with titles such as “retail clerk”, “cashier”, and “retail sales”, at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Macy’s Inc., RadioShack Corp., Baskin-Robbins and grocery chain FoodForLess among others. The number posted on the website for StudyAbroadPlus connected to a company that refused to identify itself, and claimed never to have heard of the organization. StudyAbroadPlus did not reply to Mint’s emails.
Two recent investigations published by the Chronicle of Higher Education, a US publication, and the San Jose Chronicle, a Silicon Valley newspaper, identified several other schools across the US that have similar business models to TVU and UNVA. They included Herguan University (the former employer of TVU’s founder, Susan Xiao Ping), and the International Technological University (ITU). In a telephone call from the US, one student said both Herguan University and ITU have since become stringent with their academic process.
Online postings by Tri-Valley students indicate that many students were aware of the situation they were getting into. In fact, many selected the university not for its educational value, but the opportunities for off-campus work. Some students even became recruiters, accepting payment for each new student they brought to the school. On 7 January, days before the swoop by federal authorities on TVU, a person who goes by the handle Guru Guru posted this on an Orkut forum: “University name is Trivalley university, it is located at pleasanton, california. here classes are online so you don’t have to relocate, university offers CPT so you can work legally 40 hours as full time. they charge only $100 (Rs. 4,700) for CPT… you don’t have to worry about the course work, they will give you good grades. By using CPT you can work full time so we will help you in your desired software technology.”
Earn while you learn
Orkut user Vinod Babu, claiming to represent a firm named Lorvin Overseas, tried to entice prospective students in a thread in August 2010. “As you know that most of the Universities in USA give legal permission of 10-20 working hours per week, so Students looking for part time jobs in gas stations and motels they hardly earn $6 to $7 per hour. But there are few Universities like UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA which gives legal permission to work 40 hrs a week,” he said. “So that u can work full time in IT firm we can help u in getting Free Admission in the University and job assistance… Earn while you learn.”
Other postings indicate that students were paid $400 for every successful referral made. “hey guyz we get money ($400) if we refer a frnd to this university,” S.K.N. Reddy wrote in a June 2010 posting. “If you guyz who know abt the university and transfering with out any reference jsz keep my name. we can share the money. $100 for me $300 for you,” he wrote.
One consultant, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said only about 100 of the 1,500 Indian students who attended TVU actually secured a visa based on direct admission offers by the univesity. The rest obtained F-1 visas based on I-20 student forms from other, accredited universities, and then transferred.
The drive to enrol in programmes that offer such questionable “work-study” opportunities seems to be particularly strong in Andhra Pradesh, which was recently named a “visa fraud hub” of India by the US Consulate, along with Gujarat and Punjab, according to a WikiLeaks cable released in April to The Hindu. In the cases of both TVU and UNVA, the bulk of the students came from Andhra Pradesh—some 1,500 and 2,000, respectively.
Ashwini, who recently graduated from a university in the US and wants to be identified by only his first name, says the accreditation status of a university isn’t always the top priority for students from Andhra Pradesh. “Here in the US, it is very different from India. Nobody bothers about your degree here. All they care about is your work experience,” he said over the telephone. “Basically, there is not much difference between a good university and an average university,” he explained. “They (employers) give you the same salary regardless of where you come from, and most people go through consultancies for the same jobs. What is the point in going to big universities and paying such huge fees,” he said.
According to Ashwini, the reason some Indian students opt for universities such as TVU and UNVA was because they can pay their own fees. As few employers check on the accreditation of US institutions, their alumni still manage to find jobs. “I think it is us (Indians) who are taking advantage of the loopholes in their (US) system,” said Ashwini.
This is the first of a two-part series on unaccredited, for-profit schools. Next: Unscrupulous education consultants.
Source: Mint, September 15, 2011
High cut-offs drive students to US
The intimidating barriers for entry to India’s top colleges have had an unexpected fallout. If the rise in student visa applications this year is anything to go by, students, instead of downgrading their choices and settling for second- or third-best, are increasingly looking westwards and flooding American universities with admission applications.
Data released by the US embassy reveals that the number of Indian students who have applied for visas to study in the US is up 20% over last year. Education counsellors say they are seeing large crowds again, the vital difference being that the students seeking advice are much younger. While 24,500 Indian students were granted visas to join American universiti
es last year, most went there for a Masters and 14.5% joined a grad school. “But this year has seen a phenomenal rise in the number of undergraduate students,” said counselor Pratibha Jain.
Officials at the American embassy confirmed that the number of student visa applications in India was already significantly higher than at this point last year. “The US has greatly expanded its consular staffing and educational outreach initiatives to ensure that prospective students can get the visa appointments and information they need,” said an official. “This effort includes significantly increased funding for the Education-USA advising centers.”
Jain said she had noticed a shift in the attitude of students. “Earlier, they all wanted to go to the famous 10 to 15 universities,” she said. “Now there is a range of good second-tier colleges they are willing to go to. Community colleges that charge about Rs. 1.2-1.5 million annually are also on the Indian students’ radar now.” However, experts said it was too early to forecast the number of actual entrants to American universities this fall. “It depends on how many are accepted at universities and how many meet with consular approval,” said an education consultant.
Source: The Times of India, August 6, 2011
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