MORE COLLEGES TO CLOSE DUE TO IMMIGRATION FRAUD
It has been reported by ABC TV news and Times TV news agencies that more than 2,700 international students suffered another setback after the collapse of four private colleges in Australia on Friday, Nov 6.
Global Campus Management Group, which owns these colleges in Sydney and Melbourne, was placed into voluntary administration on Thursday, Nov 5. About 2,700 International students were affected which includes students who were about to take their exams shortly. The students were mainly from India and other Asian countries.
India’s deputy high commissioner to Australia, V K Sharma, said an estimated 300 or so of the affected students were Indians and that the recent collapse of some colleges had led to a sharp fall in student arrivals from India. “There was also a lot of fraud going on in the system,” he added.
The colleges are located at 13 campuses in Melbourne and Sydney and provide tuitions in Hospitality, Design, English language, Fashion and Secondary education.
“In just two weeks we were going to get our degrees,” one student said.”They are not professional, they are the people who are dodgy here,” another said.
‘This is a company that’s made what appears to be a reasonably quick decision on withdrawing their financial support for the ongoing operations of the company. The administrators have moved in very quickly to close the schools down, which causes concerns because of the effect it has on the carrer of the students’, says the media report.
Schools affected include Meridian International Schools, the International Design School and International College of Creative Arts which have campuses in both Sydney and Melbourne and ESMOD Australia which is located in Sydney.
A student said: “In just two weeks we were going to get our degrees.” Melbourne-based Jass Sandhu says she had no information from the school about the closure. Immigration should do something for us. If the college has closed it’s not our problem. “We were studying well, we were paying our dues. What about our future?” she said.
Angry students gathered outside colleges demanding answers. Karun Sachdeva, 24, from India, was studying at International Design School. He said he did not know whether he would be refunded the $2500 he had paid for the next semester. “I made the biggest mistake coming to study in Australia,” he told The Age. “The quality of education here is shit. We have nothing but the media to rely on now to protect our rights”.
Victorian education officials rushed to secure the exam papers of 19 VCE students, and a new venue was hastily arranged for them last night to enable them to sit for their exams from Monday.
Yesterday’s closures amounted to the single biggest loss of student places in a day since the crisis began. Nine Victorian colleges have now closed since July, affecting a total of 2695 international and domestic students. The situation has been deteriorating for the last couple of years but the Australian government has so far failed miserably to take adequate measures that the education system runs smoothly and that the racial attacks on Indian students are stopped.
The $16.5 billion international education industry is braced for further college closures in coming months as the Federal Government cracks down on migration fraud, which is expected to result in the rejection of some visa applications. Further college closures could hit Victoria’s economy hard – international education is the state’s biggest export earner, bringing in more than $4 billion a year.
Education Industry insiders say governments have been slow to rein in unscrupulous operators because of reluctance to upset a lucrative industry. No action appears to have been taken on Sanjay Deshhwal who had been allegedly booked for provision of forged documents to foreign students. Another immigration agent Sam Tejani had closed shop earlier.
Ravi Matah