American Colleges Pay Agents to Woo Foreigners, Despite Fraud Risk By Te-Ping Chen And Melissa Korn
http://www.wsj.com/articles/american-colleges-pay-agents-to-woo-foreigners-despite-fraud-risk-1443665884
Campuses pay commissions to build foreign enrollment but sometimes get phony applications, ghostwritten essays.
Like many U.S. colleges, Wichita State University wants more foreign students but isn’t a brand name abroad.So the school, whose mascot is a muscle-bound wheat bundle, in late 2013 started paying agents to recruit in places like China and India. The independent agents assemble candidates’ documents and urge them to apply to the Kansas school, which pays the agents $1,000 to $1,600 per enrolled student.
Overseas applications “shot up precipitously,” says Vince Altum, Wichita State’s executive director for international education.
But there is a down side: Wichita State rejected several Chinese applications this year from an agency it suspected of falsifying transcripts, Mr. Altum says, adding that it terminates ties with agencies found to violate its code of conduct by faking documents.
Paying agents a per-student commission is illegal under U.S. law when recruiting students eligible for federal aid—that is, most domestic applicants. But paying commissioned agents isn’t illegal when recruiting foreigners who can’t get federal aid.
So more schools like Wichita State are relying on such agents, saying the intermediaries are the most practical way to woo overseas youths without the cost of sending staff around the world. No one officially counts how many U.S. campuses pay such agents, most of whom operate abroad, but experts estimate at least a quarter do so.
“Using agencies to help connect with talented, qualified prospects has been very helpful,” says Michael Heintze, associate vice president for enrollment management at Texas State University, which began using agents in 2012.
Critics of agent use like Philip Altbach, a Boston College professor who studies higher education, say it is rife with abuses and conflicts of interest, and may eventually degrade the quality of U.S. higher education. “The growing reliance on agents is a terrible development, and it’s very widespread,” especially at less-elite schools needing help boosting enrollment, says Mr. Altbach, whose institution doesn’t use agents. “Why are American universities doing this? The answer is very simple: money.”
The agent debate is dividing U.S. higher education. Concerns about recruiting through paid agents—they range from freelance operators to firms with hundreds of employees—are deepening as the foreign-applicant flow grows.
A record 886,052 overseas students enrolled in U.S. universities and colleges in the 2013-2014 school year, versus 573,000 a decade earlier, with nearly one-third from China, says the nonprofit Institute of International Education. Chinese enrollees were up 41% in the year from two school years before.
ENLARGE The increase is driven partly by schools offsetting budget cuts. Nationwide, per-student funding at public colleges fell 13% in fiscal 2014 from 2009, says the State Higher Education Executive Officers association. Foreign students usually pay full nonresident tuition. At Wichita State, that is $12,681, versus $6,022 for in-state tuition this school year.
Hugo Hu, U.S. deputy director of EIC Education, a Chinese agency that recruits for American campuses and also takes students as clients, says it is hard for Chinese students, who often don’t have college counselors, to navigate the maze of applications on their own. “There are so many U.S. schools out there,” he says, “and that’s where we can help students.”
Phony applications
Skeptics say agents, whether paid by a school or an applicant, can open the door to falsified applications that make admission easier for unqualified candidates, such as those with poor English or spotty academic records.
For a college, poorly qualified students can add burdens—requiring professors to bring them up to speed in class, say—or jeopardize accreditation.
North Dakota’s Dickinson State University says its accreditor sanctioned it after an audit found most of its agent-recommended students weren’t fulfilling graduation requirements. “We’re still working to recover our reputation,” says D.C. Coston, who called for the audit as Dickinson State’s president in 2011 and retired this August. Interim President Jim Ozbun says the school has stopped using agents.
For a foreign student, an agent’s guidance may mean landing on a campus that doesn’t offer the appropriate curriculum or support. And when an unqualified student gets a college slot with a falsified application, it can mean a lost college prospect for a qualified applicant.
“We find third-party recruiting agents to be not just not cost-effective, but dangerous,” says Dale Gough, international education services director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
The debate intensified in 2013, when the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which previously barred use of commission-based agents among its members, changed its ethics code to permit them for foreign applications if schools ensured integrity and transparency.
Some nonmember colleges were already using commission-based agents for foreign applicants, as were some member colleges despite the NACAC ban. But the shift by NACAC, whose members include most major U.S. universities and many smaller ones, opened the door wider.
Paying commissioned agents remained illegal for most U.S. applicants under a ban Congress enacted in 1992 after agent-fraud concerns.
NACAC reversed itself after hearing from about 100 colleges that wanted to expand recruiting, says David Hawkins, its executive director of educational content and policy. “Ultimately,” he says, “this association is governed by its members.”
Member schools that started using commissioned agents since then include campuses like Wichita State and Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va. Colleges typically pay an agent 10% to 15% of first-year tuition for a foreign student who enrolls.
“The most efficient way to recruit international students is through agents,” says Charles Nieman, director of international initiatives at Shepherd, which wants to increase international enrollment to about 5% of its 4,500 students from under 1% now.
A Beijing agency
Students also hire agents to help land them in U.S. colleges, a practice especially popular in China. “My impression is 80%-90% use some kind of agency services,” says Rick Shang, who moderates an online forum for Chinese students in America.
ENLARGE Demand for agents was visible recently at Tiandao Education, an agency that spreads across a Beijing office tower’s sixth floor. Dozens of students and counselors sat in clusters or conference rooms named “Ivy 1,” “Ivy 2” and “Ivy 3,” flipping through images of U.S. schools on iPads.
American-college pennants and admission letters adorned Tiandao’s walls, with statistics on how many Tiandao students got in. A placard by a Cornell University letter said 239 Tiandao clients gained admission there.
Eric Xiao, director of Tiandao’s college-application business, says agencies often ghostwrite student essays but Tiandao discourages students from engaging in such activities or other falsification. U.S. students also get outside help, he says. “It’s a question of the extent,” he says. “OK, in China, it might be a little more.”
Cornell says it doesn’t use agents and doesn’t allow applicants to use them to complete applications. Students found submitting misleading materials face possible expulsion, it says.
Shawn Felton, Cornell’s undergraduate-admission director, says it is concerning that agents tout their ability to get students into Cornell. “Students should be completing and submitting their admission applications themselves. Agents should not be handling these particular tasks.”
ENLARGE Adding to concerns, some agents work for both students and colleges, taking commissions from both sides for a successful enrollment. That can give an agent the incentive to get a student accepted at a client school’s detriment or to place a commission-paying student on an inappropriate campus to get the school’s commission as well.
Some schools prohibit double-dipping. Shepherd says it bars agents from charging both school and applicant.
Several Chinese students interviewed say agents in China falsified their documents or wrote their essays, sometimes discouraging them from playing any role in preparing their applications.
A University of California, Berkeley, sophomore from China says his family paid roughly $30,000 to an agent who rewrote his essay using language the student never used. He feels uneasy, he says, but “no one knows about the whole application process better than they do so I had no choice.”
A Berkeley spokeswoman declines to comment on specific cases. Berkeley doesn’t pay agents and discourages their use, she says, but lets students use them if work submitted is “their own and accurate.” The school randomly requests additional documentation to combat fraud, she says, and students who provide false information can be expelled.
A Chinese student who started at New York University this fall says her family paid $26,000 for an agent who wrote her personal statement, inventing a tale about how the student dragged her father out of a gambling den to save him from a life of vice, and how he stopped gambling and “has instead devoted himself to spreading his appreciation of nature.”
The student says “that stuff didn’t actually happen” and that she wrote her own essay. NYU doesn’t pay agents but allows applicants to as long as they don’t falsify any information. If the student had used the fake essay, an NYU spokesman says, she would have been subject to expulsion.
Spotting falsification can be hard, other schools say, given small admissions staffs and high foreign-applicant volume. The University of Pennsylvania says applicants to this fall’s freshman class include students from roughly 1,000 schools new to its database of about 10,000. Penn, which doesn’t pay agents and says it discourages families from using them, uses Google searches and input from alumni to learn about unfamiliar schools, and occasionally verifies reference letters with schools.
But “we’re not going to pick up the phone on every single application,” says admissions dean Eric Furda. “We can’t.”
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign doesn’t do “a lot of individual fact-checking,” says Charles Tucker, its vice provost for undergraduate education. Its applications from China for the fall 2014 class rose to 6,160 from 2,595 four years before.
The university doesn’t pay agents but lets applicants do so. Applicants provide self-reported overviews of high-school records, filing official transcripts only after admission. “The admissions people feel fairly confident” they can spot falsifications, Mr. Tucker says. Still, he says, the only compelling way to determine that an essay or test score doesn’t reflect capabilities is to see the person struggle in class.
Curbing fraud
One way to curb fraud, says Charles Wester, associate director of Asia outreach at Omaha’s Creighton University, is to spot-check candidates in video interviews. Another is to work principally with overseas high schools that ensure secure transcripts and recommendations, he says. Creighton keeps a database of trusted high schools.
Many campuses are “all too eager to turn a blind eye, however revenue’s coming in,” Mr. Wester says. Applications from Asia have increased 30% since 2012 at Creighton, which doesn’t use commissioned agents and interviews all Chinese applicants in person or by video, he says.
Federal data show 64% of nonresident-alien students starting full-time undergraduate programs in 2007 graduated within six years, versus 59% for all students. But some overseas students start in remedial programs, not on degree tracks, never making it into mainstream courses nor on rolls used to calculate graduation rates.
They can still hurt a school. Dickinson State, which isn’t a NACAC member, began using agents about a decade ago. The internal audit, released in 2012, found that it was admitting students—recommended by agents it paid—with questionable qualifications and that it had been duped by altered transcripts.
Only 10 of more than 400 foreign students receiving degrees over the prior decade had fulfilled graduation requirements, the report said. The school’s accreditor sanctioned it for that shortfall and issues including financial-stewardship concerns. Dickinson State has stopped paying agents and beefed up admission requirements, and the sanction was lifted in late 2013.
“There may be a role for agents,” says Mr. Ozbun, the interim president, “but at least for the moment we’re not anticipating moving ahead with any of that kind of activity.”
Wichita State, which previously worked with agents whom students paid, started to pay agents after NACAC’s reversal. Many rival schools were paying agents, Wichita State’s Mr. Altum says. “This was our way to remain competitive.”
One graduate-school dean worried agents would hurt its reputation, he says, but most were on board. With more applicants, Wichita State can be more selective, Mr. Altum says. It had 1,848 foreign enrollees in fall 2014, up 65% from fall 2010, a rise he attributes to agents.
Wichita State contacts high schools when there are document-authenticity concerns and sometimes “spit tests” signatures, wetting them to see if they smear (ink does, laser-printed signatures don’t), or uses black lights to check transcripts for doctoring.
Wichita State has stopped requiring essays of any applicant, Mr. Altum says, because “it’s too easy to have someone write an essay on your behalf.”
—Ned Levin contributed to this article.
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