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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.

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..

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.

Although Chinese students have been going to America to study for decades, their numbers have grown dramatically in the past few years. Many of them have only a basic knowledge of foreign universities and difficulty making sense of complicated applications. As a result, a huge industry of education agents has arisen in the country to help guide them — and, in some cases, to do whatever it takes to ensure that they are accepted.

The State Board of Higher Education is working to tighten admission policies for international students after an audit found some Chinese student transcripts submitted to Dickinson State University were fakes.

The detection of wholesale cheating in college applications is on the rise due to the use of Turnitin for Admissions, an anti-plagiarism database service that compares student essays to an immense archive of other writings. Around the country, more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted it, mainly in graduate divisions, although Stanford University is among the dozen schools starting to use it for freshman applicants this year.