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UNVA Diploma mill in Virginia raided
08/03/11
Some time back, I wrote a post about an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education regarding shady diploma mills exploiting visa loopholes.
That investigation was triggered by the raid of the particularly brazen diploma mill Tri-Valley University in Pleasanton, CA, in January.
The "University of Northern Virginia", one of the institutions that got prominently featured in the Chronicle article from March now got raided by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and faces likely closure as well.
There are a few more such brazen diploma mills waiting to get raided...
Update: It seems that at least some of these diploma mills have threatened legal action against forums and blogs reporting about them. See, e.g., here. I haven't received any such threat (yet), but I will continue to call any non-accredited institution a diploma mill.
Update:
According to http://watchdog.org/95968/university-of-northern-virginia-forced-to-close-leaving-students-in-limbo/, this fake university is now forced to close.
About time.
From the article:
The University of Northern Virginia should soon receive a cease and desist letter forcing the campus to close immediately, leaving students unsure if their credits are transferable.
The State Council for Higher Education in Virginia revoked the university?s license to operate Tuesday based on the school?s inability to regain accreditation.
1 comment
On one of the many discussions that started about this diploma mill after it got raided by ICE, somebody posted this email/newsletter from the then UNVA chancellor (he since resigned):
“A brief history of UNVA accreditation.
UNVA was initially accredited by ACICS.
In 2007-2008 there was a “management coup” in which the management took control of the university from the owner. The management group created a competing university and did a great deal of damage to UNVA. We believe (they actually told one of our team) that the intent was to destroy UNVA and move the students, staff and faculty to the new school.
During this time there were issues with ACICS. The management team reached an agreement with ACICS in which accreditation would be withdrawn in August, 2008 and that UNVA would never again apply for ACICS accreditation. The August date meant that they would keep accreditation while they were in control but that it would be lost when the actual owner was back in control.
When the owner returned, the university was in chaos. More than 50 boxes of files had been shredded. Student and faculty records and financial records were in disarray or nonexistent. Money had been drained from the accounts. The student population was down, and very few new students had joined, meaning that the current students were about to graduate. There was no functional electronic student records system, and the electronic data we had was incomplete, inaccurate, and located in multiple unconnected files. In short, the university was in no condition to apply for accreditation.
For the next 18 months, we focused our efforts on recovery. We corrected all of the above problems. Our student population grew. We added additional locations with upgraded systems. We finally felt that we had made enough progress to begin a new accreditation process. We elected to apply to SACS, considered by many to be one of the most difficult accreditations to obtain. We assigned staff and also hired consultants for the project.
The application took more than a year to write. That is because during the process we found areas in our university which we needed to improve in order to make the application stronger. We finally completed the application and submitted it to SACS. They accepted the application and began their review process.
During this time, I was trying to keep everyone informed through articles in our newsletter. SACS notified me that I was breaking an accreditation rule by doing so and told me to stop. I wrote an article in the next newsletter saying that because of the rule I could provide much less information in the future.
SACS returned the application with the recommendation that we withdraw. They gave several reasons. The most difficult to correct was the lack of an acceptable Institutional Effectiveness Plan. This is a process where we show that we collect data about the effectiveness of our university (graduation rates, learning outcomes, whether students get jobs after graduation, etc.). We also have to have ways to identify problems and to correct them and to show an ongoing history (with proper documentation) of following the plan.
We agreed to withdraw the application, which is the reason that I am now able to write this article. We can resubmit after we have addressed the areas in which they have concerns.
We also spoke to ACICS regarding their willingness to accept a new application from UNVA, given the extensive changes and improvements in our school in the past 3 years. They made no promises but they were at least willing to speak with us. While we were in those discussions, we got the ICE raid. Since then we have had no further discussions with ACICS.
While accreditation is very important to UNVA, our immediate focus is on responding to the SEVP letter. We will re-focus on accreditation as soon as the immediate crisis is resolved.
David Lee”
It seems that there are forces that try to suppress this letter. That’s why I am re-posting it here, to preserve it for eternity…
