Indian student industry a study in shams and scams

Indian student industry a study in shams and scams
from the Australian
AUSTRALIA'S lust for high-dollar Indian students has led to a thriving black market in sham marriages, forged English language exams and bogus courses, and turned a once-respected international education sector into a recognised immigration racket.

While the federal government and industry work to repair the damage caused by a recent spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, education agents say the violence has shone a light on a $14 billion industry riven with corruption.

An investigation into the overseas student industry has found thousands of Indians each year are being enrolled in dodgy courses at inflated prices and sold unrealistic dreams of cheap living and plentiful jobs.

The Australian has found operators across the Punjab, the main feeder community for Indian students in Australia, openly advertising "contract marriages" for aspiring immigrants to partners who have passed the mandatory English test for a student visa.

For an additional fee, agents will arrange bank documents and loans to satisfy Australian immigration law that demands students have the means to support themselves for the duration of their course.

Industry insiders say a flourishing market has also developed around the International English Language Test System, with students paying anything up to $20,000 for a good result.

Sonya Singh, a respected Indian education agent servicing the Australian market, says the myriad scams offered to foreign students each year have made "Australia a supermarket where people are buying stuff off the shelf".

"A good-quality Indian student notices a completely no-good student on the same flight as him to Australia and starts to wonder where he's going," she said. "Indians are so conscious of branding and Australia's reputation has suffered a lot because of the recruitment process.

"My own kids didn't want to study in Australia because they had a perception that poor-quality students go there and that if they told their friends they were going to Australia, they would be laughed at or thought of as lesser."

Corruption is now so rife among India-based education agents that Ms Singh says she has had to institute a new policy across all 24 of her agencies in India and Australia. "The first thing they must tell every student that walks through the door is 'We don't arrange funds and we don't arrange marriages'," shesaid.

"In Melbourne, we get lots of requests to arrange IELTS scores and work-experience permits (to satisfy new requirements that a student must have completed 900 hours of work before being granted permanent residency)."

Last week, police arrested three people in the Punjab city of Ludhiana for impersonation and forgery after they were found to be sitting the IELTS exam for aspiring foreign students.

A police spokesman told local media the scam was an "organised racket" and further arrests were expected.

Foreign students and a voracious Indian media have reacted angrily to the recent attacks, prompting government and industry to announce legislative reviews, investigations into student welfare and a 10-point plan to reform the sector.

A delegation of government, police and education officials will tomorrow) conclude an eight-city tour of India designed to assure agents, parents and an Indian government made nervous by intense domestic media coverage that everything possible is being done to ensure the safety of foreign students.

However, Ms Singh says the root cause of student tension is not the attacks but a deep disconnect between the life they were told would be theirs and the debt, loneliness and disenchantment they find is the reality.

Fifty-one foreign students committed suicide in Australia last year, a fair proportion of them Indians whose families had sold land and taken on huge loans in the hope their child's success would repay in multiples.

Robert Palmer, who runs the Overseas Students Support Network in Melbourne, says supplying students to Australia has become a gold mine for education agents.

While universities and TAFEs pay about 25 per cent commission on first semester fees, equivalent to about $1200-$1500 per student, private institutes will pay up to 30 per cent of the entire course fee, providing a clear financial incentive for agents to channel students their way, and even into courses in which they have no interest.

And there is no shortage of willing students. The Australian approached six young men on the streets of Jalandhar, three of whom said they aimed to be studying in Australia by the end of the year. Among them was Jaspreet Badhan, who said he hoped to get permanent residency in Australia after studying hotel management. He added that many of his friends were hoping to study overseas.

Harmeet Pental, South Asia director of the Australian university-owned IDP Education agency, believes the problem lies with Australia's immigration processes. "The US interviews every single student going there -- whether it's for two or five minutes -- and then makes a call on their fitness," he said. "For Australia, agents have a list of skill sets given by the high commission and of the documentation required. That's it. The process is driving the behaviour."

Ms Singh says the Australian government policy of giving priority visa consideration to students who train in fields listed on the Critical Skills Shortage register has turned "genuine" students away.

"Every time a new (critical skills) list comes out, education providers start introducing those courses."

But Colin Walters, the federal Education Department official leading the Australian delegation in India, says that should change following the Indian government's decision last week to regulate the agent industry.

"The sector has grown very rapidly and there are some criticisms about some providers, so we need a vigorous audit system so their outcomes can be carefully scrutinised," he said.

Agents prey on foreign students

Agents prey on foreign students
from the Australian
LURED by the high commissions offered by private colleges in Australia, unscrupulous education agents in India are using false promises of work and residency to funnel students into courses that in some cases they don't want to do.

In extreme cases, international students arrive thinking they will be studying in beautiful buildings such as Melbourne's historic town hall, only to discover on arrival that their college is a "dog box", according to student advocate Robert Palmer.

Mr Palmer, a veteran of the education industry, said students were turning up at his Overseas Student Support Network in Melbourne complaining of being duped by their agents.

He said colleges and regulators were also to blame for not doing enough to prevent students from falling prey to lying agents.

"People in Australia conveniently say they can't control overseas agents, but if they are your agent then you are legally responsible for their actions," Mr Palmer said.

He said that under the Education Services for Overseas Students Act, providers -- universities, TAFEs or private colleges -- must ensure students are fully informed before they enrol and that wasn't happening.

"If the act was policed properly, you would go a long way towards solving the problem," he said.

Last month, the federal government brought forward a planned review to tighten up the ESOS act.

Australia's commercially focused education industry is an attractive trade for offshore education agents. Universities and TAFEs are prized clients because they have large and regular volumes. But the competition can weigh on commissions. According to Mr Palmer, a university would commonly pay a 25 per cent commission on first semester fees, equivalent to about $1200-$1500 a student.

Private colleges, especially new ones in need of students, are happy to pay much higher commissions to ensure supply. Mr Palmer said they commonly paid 30 per cent of the fee for a whole course. For a two-year course, which is the minimum required for a student to apply for skilled migration, fees would commonly amount to $16,000, translating into a commission of almost $5000 a student.

At the Australian end of the trade, students can find themselves left struggling to get refunds from colleges that enforce sometimes tight deadlines on notices of cancellations.

"Once they get their hands on the student, they will do everything in their power to keep the student in their college," Mr Palmer said.

Mr Palmer estimated that since February, when OSSN opened its office in Melbourne, he had handled 1000 legitimate complaints. Of those, at least 80per cent were about students being misled by education agents in their home country.

Michael Bull, of Immigration Consulting Group Australia, said students were made easy prey for unscrupulous agents by the pressure put on them by their families, who often took out hefty loans in the hope the student would be able to secure work and eventually residency.

"Their eyes are on the pot of gold and that makes them vulnerable to misinformation, badly researched information or straight out crooks," Mr Bull said.

He said some students were also simply trying to get around the system, believing they would somehow be able to secure residency once they were here.

Mr Bull said the industry needed to do more to ensure agents were giving out the right information. He said some colleges were ramping up their efforts, noting that last year he was twice commissioned by a college to travel to India to check up on agents.

The Australian Council for Private Education and Training is investigating the possibility of establishing a register of approved agents for the industry. Its chief executive, Andrew Smith, said: "The regulations are clear that the colleges are responsible but the difficulty is in how you address the acts of people halfway around the world."

Attack over flying school

Attack over flying school
From the Australian
THE Indian consul general in Sydney has slammed Australian education authorities for their slow response to complaints from Indian students against a flying school caught out using under-qualified instructors.

The education watchdog has threatened to deregister Aerospace Aviation at Bankstown in southwest Sydney after finding a "critical" breach of standards regulating the teaching of overseas students.

Consul general Gautam Roy said yesterday the tardy response of state and federal education departments had caused several students to return to India and others to be lumped with debt from a failed legal action against the school.

Five Indian students, who complained the school did not provide adequate resources for them to complete their courses on time, have been forced home to start paying off loans for their unfinished courses.

More than 20 Indian students from the school reported their complaints to the federal Education Department in a face-to-face meeting on October 17. The complaints were referred to the Vocational Education and Training Accreditation Board, which took until May to audit the school.

The audit found Aerospace Aviation instructors did not have qualifications required by the Australian Quality Training Framework.

The students also contacted the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and the NSW Office of Fair Trading.

After getting little joy from the authorities, nine of the students attempted to recover pre-paid school fees from Aerospace by issuing the school with a statutory demand in March.

NSW Supreme Court judge Richard White threw the claim out of court last week, saying the avenue taken by the students to seek the refunds was not the correct one, as statutory demands were for the recovery of established debts, not "disputed demands". The students will have to pay the legal costs for Aerospace Aviation.

"I am sure they would not have gone to court if they had got some kind of reassurance from the authorities who are supposed to look into the affairs of the education providers," Mr Roy said yesterday.

The NSW Department of Education and Training yesterday said VETAB had waited for the outcome of an investigation into the complaints by the federal Education Department before undertaking the May audit.

Aerospace, which denies all of the students' allegations, has been given two weeks to comply with the VETAB standards.

A statement by Aerospace's director of training and chief flying instructor, Sue Davis, said the company was "confident" it would meet the standards.

If you are going to apply for an Australian Student visa anytime soon, then be adviced that there may be a steep increase in the fee...according to this news article from "The Australian"

Increased visa fees to fund embassy makeovers

FOREIGN students wanting to study in Australia will be forced to pay an extra 20 per cent for their entry permits after another hike in visa fees.

Humanitarian arrivals, tourists and temporary residents who were hit with visa fee increases last year have been spared further pain.

But students, business people, skilled migrants and certain family categories are going to be hit hard, with the new measures expected to raise $402.3 million over the next four years.

For foreign students, the changes mean a hike from $450 to about $540 for each application.

It will also cost more to become an Australian citizen, with the application fee up 10 per cent to $260 for people born overseas.

The additional revenue will help offset the cost of building several new embassies.

The Bangkok embassy, one of the most important in Asia, is to be relocated to a more secure area, as will the Jakarta mission, which was severely damaged in a terrorist attack in 2005.

It will also help pay the $1million it cost the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to evacuate Australians stranded in Bangkok last year when anti-government protesters occupied the country's main airport.

Canberra's container-based diplomats in Kabul will be pleased to learn that $3 million has been allocated for a study of where to put a new embassy in the Afghan capital. The money will match a dramatic increase in military and civilian aid.

Australia's foreign-based spies get $43.7 million over four years, money the Australian Secret Intelligence Service will spend on enhancing counter-terrorism capabilities in the immediate region.

Security at diplomatic posts will get a $54 million budget boost, including $18.7 million in capital funding. "The measure aims to ensure adequate levels of protection are provided for personnel, visitors, property and information. This includes enhancement to both physical, information and communication technology security," the budget papers say.

Recognising the continuing threat posed by terrorism, the Government has allocated $28.1million to DFAT for counter-terror activities focused primarily in Southeast Asia.

Building on Kevin Rudd's First National Security Statement in December, the budget includes $106.5 million over four years to strengthen diplomacy, advance trade prospects and protect Australians abroad. The Prime Minister's hopes of securing a non-permanent UN Security Council seat will be helped by an extra $11.2million in lobbying funds. If successful it will have Australia sitting on the council for a two-year term from 2013-14.

"Membership of the Security Council would enhance Australia's ability to shape international responses to security issues," the papers say. "The measure will help support the campaign through funding additional staff at the New York mission, supplementing smaller missions on an as-needs basis, deploying special envoys and supporting ministerial campaigning."

Research Shows Migrants Still Contributing to Strong Economic Growth

here is a very promising article from macarne
people some times ask me why hundreds of young, well qualified people move to australia each year and more so during the period of recession. here is an article that shows that migrants do find jobs and settle down reasonably well after the initial struggle.

Research Shows Migrants Still Contributing to Strong Economic Growth
New research by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) shows that migrants accelerate their employment outcomes in the year following their first six months in Australia.
Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Kevin Andrews said today the third Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia (LSIA3) showed that employment among skilled migrants increased from 91 per cent after six months to 97 per cent after they had been in Australia for 18 months.
‘The research also shows a dramatic improvement for family-stream migrants where employment increased from 80 per cent to 94 per cent in the year after their first six months settling in,’ Mr Andrews said.
‘Australia is the ideal destination for migrants - our strong economy is complemented by our selection of young migrants with good English and recognised skills.
‘After 18 months in Australia, median earnings of skilled migrants are $47 000 a year.
‘Skilled migrants living in regional and low-growth areas do even better, with 99 per cent employed after 18 months and average incomes around $50 000.’
The longitudinal survey also showed the correlation of higher English language test scores and better job outcomes, endorsing Government changes to the skilled migration points test.
If migrants are to actively participate in the workforce, then at the very least they need a reasonable command of English. It also makes sense if migrants are to take advantage of everything that this country has to offer, both the economic and social benefits.
LSIA3 interviewed almost 10 000 primary applicants from the skilled and family migration streams who arrived in Australia or were granted visas onshore between December 2004 and March 2005.

Permanent Residents and to be PRs need to read this...

If you are coming to Australia as a Permanent Resident from another country or are completing study here and are applying for onshore PR, there are some useful details which you can go through. The Department of Immigration has published a set of pdf files - Welcome kits...for PRs and to be PRs.
check it out here.

these pdf files have everything that you need to know to start a new life in Austraila !

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The most recent news updates...be it relating to University rankings or changes in Permanent Residency rule changes....you can follow it all within the Latest News label right here on the "Student Life in Australia" Blog