Acting to close a major loophole in the student-visa system, the U.S. House of Representatives has approved legislation requiring colleges and universities that enroll foreign students to be accredited.
By a voice vote, lawmakers on Wednesday night passed a bill, HR 3120, that would require all higher-education institutions that enroll 25 or more students on nonimmigrant visas to have national or regional accreditation recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.
If approved by the U.S. Senate, the measure—which was proposed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat—would eliminate a significant shortcoming in visa law, passed in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, that has allowed fraudulent universities to take in thousands of foreign students and essentially sell them the right to work in the United States.
“The accreditation requirements instituted by this bill will prevent illegitimate institutions from cheating foreign students who legitimately seek a bona fide education in the United States,” Ms. Lofgren said on the House floor on Tuesday night. “In addition, this requirement will prevent fly-by-night institutions from engaging in student-visa fraud to smuggle or traffic persons into the country.”
Representative Lofgren introduced the legislation in response to the raid and closure of one such institution in California, Tri-Valley University, which was the subject of an extensive Chronicle investigation. Although Tri-Valley had no real campus and its students were spread across the country, it was able to win approval from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to accept overseas students by—falsely, it turns out—asserting that its credits had been accepted by three accredited colleges. Under current law, that was enough. The institution, dubbed a “sham university” by federal investigators, didn’t need to have accreditation itself.
Chronicle reporting uncovered a number of other institutions that appear to have exploited the same loophole in student-visa law or claimed accreditation from little-known, and potentially self-invented, accrediting agencies.
A System Vulnerable to Fraud
The House legislation would require that colleges hold accreditation from accrediting bodies recognized by the Education Department in order to be part of the student-visa system. The bill also would prohibit anyone convicted of an immigration violation, including visa fraud or human trafficking, from being in a position of authority at a college approved to participate in the visa system or from having oversight of international-student records.
If the measure becomes law, colleges will have a three-year window to meet the new accreditation requirement, although the secretary of homeland security would have the authority to waive the mandate if an institution is found to be making a good-faith effort to earn accreditation and is otherwise in compliance with visa rules.
Seminaries and other religious-education institutions would be exempt from the accreditation provision.
Victor C. Johnson, senior adviser for public policy at Nafsa: Association of International Educators, called the legislation a “responsible” and “appropriate” response to the problems that have beset the student-visa system, while providing the homeland-security secretary with some discretion. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office found that the visa program has serious flaws and is vulnerable to fraud.
The fate of the bill—or of any measure in this campaign-shortened Congressional session—is unclear, but a bipartisan group of senators said last week they planned to introduce legislation to improve oversight of the student-visa system. The measure is still being drafted, but sponsors said it would impose stiffer penalties on those who commit fraud by running bogus institutions, would require that unaccredited schools and colleges in the visa system be visited by federal investigators annually, and would ensure that academic institutions enrolling international students are certified by their home states.
Senators, who held a hearing in the wake of the GAO report, said they also would consider a provision excluding unaccredited institutions from the visa program, as part of the legislation.
Currently, only independent English-language programs are required to hold accreditation in order to enroll foreign students, a law that the langugage schools themselves pushed for in order to weed out bad actors.
