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The president and CEO of a private college that catered to foreign students has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for defrauding the Department of Homeland Security by issuing phony visa-related documents to international students in exchange for tuition and fee.

The agent debate is dead. Long live the integrity debate. For some time now, the discussion about whether American colleges could use commission-based agents when recruiting students abroad has been the hottest of hot-button issues in international admissions, with each camp staking out fiercely partisan positions.

Last December, 1,055 high school communities around Mexico – comprising almost 1.3 million students – engaged in a transparency and accountability exercise. This involves each principal of public high schools completing three electronic forms covering more than 100 indicators. These range from income and expenditure, to enrolment and academic performance, to the condition of school equipment and infrastructure.

Padding college applications is virtually as old as higher education itself. But many undergraduate and graduate officials say that in recent years there's been a spike in problematic submissions, especially from emerging markets, where the families of the elite and the growing middle..

Alberta's auditor-general says Medicine Hat College's international education division has been an out-of-control programme that has put the college at "reputational, legal and financial risk". The Auditor-Generals report released last Tuesday shows a record of irregular contracts, questionable expenses and dubious academic standards for the C$1.7-million programme, which focuses on attracting foreign students from multiple countries, and works in partnership with three Chinese institutions, to offer courses overseas for Chinese students who can then transfer to Medicine Hat College.

Striking a blow at a Silicon Valley school that attracted foreigners with student visas, federal agents raided Sunnyvale's Herguan University and charged its CEO with visa fraud. The charges come a year after an investigation found Herguan was among a group of Bay Area schools that misrepresented information on federal applications, which allowed them to sponsor overseas students for coveted visas.

The federal government wants to toughen the rules surrounding student visas in the hopes of cracking down on fraud and human smuggling — even though it's not clear just how big a problem this is. There is a proposal to weed out international students who arrive on a student visa as a means of gaining access to Canada's labour market and don't actually enrol in school. There are also concerns that some are ending up at sub-par institutions that ultimately hurt Canada's credibility on the international stage.