Student visa oversight was supposed to stop fraud. The receipts show it didn't.
Published March 30, 2026 / All data sourced from GAO, DHS, ICE/SEVP, and federal court records
The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) is the federal system that tracks every international student in the United States. It certifies schools, monitors enrollment, and is supposed to flag fraud. It is run by ICE under the Department of Homeland Security.
In theory, SEVP prevents schools from operating as visa mills, stops fake employers from selling work authorization, and ensures students who come here to study actually study. In practice, the system has been so badly mismanaged that the government had to build two fake universities just to catch the fraud its own oversight was missing.
This is not a story about immigration. This is a story about a bureaucracy that was given one job and failed at it so thoroughly that it created an underground market worth hundreds of millions of dollars, exploiting both American workers and the international students it was supposed to protect.
In 2020, there were 8,369 SEVP-certified schools authorized to enroll international students. By 2024, that number had fallen to 7,234. 1,135 schools disappeared from the system in four years.
DHS has never published a breakdown of how many were shut down for fraud vs. financial failure vs. voluntary withdrawal. Of the 7,234 schools that remained certified in 2024, 1,082 did not enroll a single foreign student. They maintained SEVP certification while serving zero international students.
The Government Accountability Office has been sounding alarms about student visa oversight for over a decade. The pattern is the same every time: GAO identifies failures, makes recommendations, agencies concur, and then nothing meaningfully changes.
Curricular Practical Training (CPT) is supposed to let students gain work experience that is an "integral part" of their curriculum. Day 1 CPT programs authorize full-time off-campus employment from the first day of enrollment.
Bloomberg's October 2024 investigation found 24,000 students enrolled in Day 1 CPT programs as of fall 2022. The business model is straightforward: pay $14,000-$17,000 per year in tuition, attend campus one weekend per semester, work full-time the rest of the time, and drop out as soon as you win the H-1B lottery. Bloomberg found more than half of enrolled students dropped out after getting selected for H-1B, and fewer than 1 in 3 stayed through graduation.
Every school named by Bloomberg is regionally accredited by a recognized accreditor. This is not a story about unaccredited degree mills. These are institutions with the same accreditation stamp as state universities.
| School | Accreditor | Day 1 CPT | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harrisburg University | MSCHE | 12 programs | 50-70% international. 3 of 5 visa staff quit in 2022 over compliance concerns. |
| Campbellsville University | SACSCOC | 5+ programs | 5,000+ international students of 12,451 total. 500+ OPT approvals/year. |
| Westcliff University | WSCUC | 6 programs | 6 campuses. $16,695/year. One-weekend-per-term attendance model. |
| U. of the Cumberlands | SACSCOC | Multiple | VP confirmed "one weekend per term" face-to-face requirement. |
| Trine University | HLC | 3+ programs | Satellite campuses in MI and AZ for Day 1 CPT. |
| New England College | NECHE | Multiple | Named in Bloomberg investigation. |
While the oversight agencies were backlogged and the accreditors were silent, a parallel industry emerged: companies that exist solely to sell fake employment to students who need work authorization on paper. Some charged $700. Some charged $2,000. All of them exploited a system that wasn't checking.
Source: ICE 2024 SEVIS by the Numbers Report
After years of backlogged audits and ignored warnings, enforcement began accelerating in 2025. The results have been dramatic, messy, and in some cases, politically motivated rather than fraud-driven.
To be clear about scale: of the 1,582,808 active F-1 and M-1 students in 2024, the vast majority are in legitimate programs at legitimate schools. The named fraud cases in this investigation account for thousands of students, not millions. Bloomberg's Day 1 CPT count of 24,000 represents roughly 1.5% of the total student population. But the oversight failures documented here affect the entire system. When 38% of work permits have no employer on file, the problem is not a few bad actors. It is a verification infrastructure that was never built to handle the scale it operates at. The students exploited by visa mills and fake employers deserve the same accountability the system owes to everyone else in it.
International students who paid tuition to schools that turned out to be visa mills. Students associated with Findream continue facing visa revocations and deportation orders years after the scheme was shut down. The University of Farmington students were arrested by the same government that created the fake university and collected their tuition.
American workers competing for jobs against a workforce that entered the labor market through a system that wasn't checking whether the "employment" was real, whether the "education" was real, or whether the "students" were studying.
Legitimate international students who followed every rule, earned real degrees, and now face the stigma and heightened scrutiny created by a system that let fraud flourish unchecked for years.
The oversight agencies were given the tools, the authority, and the mandate. They had the data. They had the warnings from GAO. They chose not to act until the fraud became too large and too visible to ignore. That's not a failure of immigration policy. That's a failure of governance.