 Pakistani fraudsters set up a network of fake colleges which helped thousands of Pakistani nationals enter Britain on student visas, The Times reported on Thursday. The students at 11 bogus colleges included eight of the 10 suspects arrested last month in a terror probe in northwest England, the newspaper said. It reported that one college sold hundreds of places to men from the NWFP. The three Pakistani businessmen operating the scam charged at least £1,000 for admission places after creating a fictional university to issue degrees, The Times said. One of the businessmen has been linked to two murders in Pakistan, it said, adding that the man was arrested on Wednesday, after The Times gave the Home Office a dossier implicating two of the colleges.
The Times said the scam exploited lax controls on student visas in Britain which are being tightened in the wake of the Pakistanis' terror probe arrests last month. The newspaper said eight of the suspects enrolled for 11 months at the Manchester College of Professional Studies, which issued hundreds of diplomas and degrees and stated that students had impeccable attendance records. In reality, the college, set up in 2006, was a "front that provided cover for students to do whatever they wanted in Britain", The Times said. Its founders claimed it was linked to "Greenford University" and "Blackpool University" in Dublin. Neither university exists. Nevertheless the 'universities' accredited the Manchester college with an array of undergraduate and postgraduate honours courses which the small three-classroom college was incapable of teaching, The Times said. At one point, the Manchester college had 1,797 students on its books.
| Make those applying for student visas take entry exams in the subject for which they claim a degree. If they can't pass, they wouldn't be able to do the work at the British university level anyway, even if the claimed degree really had been awarded by a real Pakistani college. This will also encourage Pakistani educational institutions to improve the quality of their teaching, a very good thing. Graduate work in physics and engineering in the real world cannot be calculated using djinns and ifrits. |
| We actually do this for medicine. If you're a physician in a foreign country, to get a visa into the US you have to take and pass the first two parts of the USMLE. And an English test. It wouldn't hurt at all to make this requirement for testing more universal. |
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