With his new student visa, Prasanth Goinaka was on a path toward his dream: an MBA from an American university in the heart of Silicon Valley.
That’s why his parents back in India were stunned when their 28-year-old son was killed while manning a cash register at a convenience store in Oklahoma City — 1,500 miles from campus.
A Bay Area News Group investigation has found that Goinaka — as well as thousands of other foreign students enrolled in schools here — probably should not have been in the country at all. They're being lured by unaccredited universities that promise help getting a prized student visa. But it turns out that these universities' legal right to assist with visas is in question.
Once here, students like Goinaka often have to go to extraordinary lengths to pay the bill.
But how he ended up losing his life halfway across the country from San Jose’s International Technological University is part of a much larger story of the U.S. government’s failure to catch up to a growing problem in America’s higher education system.
Little-known and less-watched, a group of schools — including San Jose’s ITU, Sunnyvale’s Herguan University and until recently Pleasanton’s now-shuttered Tri-Valley University — are building lucrative businesses by assembling student bodies comprised almost entirely of student-visa holders. Yet, the newspaper’s investigation found none of the schools meet the criteria necessary to assist foreign students to come here: They are neither accredited nor do their credits transfer to recognized universities.
"Universities like Tri-Valley are causing an enormous surge of international students," said Mohan Nannapaneni, secretary of the Milpitas-based Telugu Association of North America. The Indian nonprofit group raised $5,465 to ship Goinaka’s body to his distraught parents and donated legal help to 155 traumatized Tri-Valley students, some tagged with electronic tracking devices when the federal government shut down the school on visa fraud charges.
"Why are we putting immigration authority into (these) " … universities' hands?" Nannapaneni said.
University officials deny any wrongdoing.
But records reviewed by the newspaper tell a different story about the schools' actions, and suggest the government and even the students themselves are to blame for the problem.
Government approved A decade after terrorists in the country on student visas carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security — the very agency established to oversee a tougher visa system — endorses universities that should be ineligible to issue the necessary certificate for students to gain F1 student visas, records show. It even places these schools on the list that international students consult before pursuing a degree in the U.S.[More]