Private colleges investigated amid fears of fraud

I think that BIS needs to get a grip. If you look back to the question asked of Mr Cable at the Select Committee in January, his answer wasn't particularly convincing then, but it is downright dangerous now. Q47 Mr Bain: The Higher Education Institute has expressed the view that primary legislation might be required to sort out, in a sense, who is the lead regulator in the system and to provide clarity on that front. What would your response to that recommendation be? Vince Cable: So far, we have managed without new legislation and maybe in the next Parliament people will come back and have a look at that, but through dialogue with the sector and through the various financial streams that we have, we have been able to achieve our objectives. But I think there is an open debate out there as to whether more or less regulation is needed and it is something we may well have to come back to. Mr Cable seemed particularly keen on this analogy with the USSR (this was before we learnt that Michael Gove has a picture of Lenin in his office): Q49 Mr Bain: Is there a problem, though, with, in a sense, HEFCE being asked to regulate funds that it does not directly provide? A lot of these funds are now coming from the private sector. Vince Cable: Indeed. It is no longer a Gosplan institution—the higher education system. We had what we called free universities, but the higher education system operated like the former Soviet Union. Universities were told exactly what they could do, exactly how many students they could have and exactly what they should study. We do not think that is appropriate in our kind of world. We want students to be able to choose; we want universities to have freedom to adapt their courses, so inevitably HEFCE, which is the intermediate body between Government and the sector, does not have the degree of control that Stalin would have liked under that kind of system. We are moving into a different world and it does involve loss of control. This is more than 'loss of control'...

It is clear from the BBC's PANORAMA program and for earlier reports in the Guardian from just a few years ago that Private Colleges are extremely dubious in their records of real students and highly suspicious when it comes to student attendance. I have worked in the past in Private Colleges and the then QAA inspectorate were extremely poor in looking into student attendance. The truth is Private Colleges allow students to have poor attendance for at least a year and sometimes longer, so that the colleges can get their portion of the Student Finance Tuition Fees of £6,000 plus for each of these students. The claim they warn students about attendance is laughable for all they do is send e-mails to the students time and time again about their attendance but do not dismiss the students until the colleges get their Tuition Fees for at least one academic year. What astounds me most though is that now quite a few of these Universities are now running courses in association with the mainly on-line universities such as the Open University and other Universities also and the government departments like BIS and these other genuine and professional universities do not check the private colleges thoroughly. Private colleges are nothing more than a money making scheme for their owners who put profit before education and they will take on so called students who have little or no qualifications or relative employment experience and in some cases have poor written or spoken English skills. Real Tutors and staff leave because they do not want to be be part of what goes on in these Private Colleges, other staff stay because they would not be capable of working in a genuine colleges or universities or because they are relatives, or because they obtained their posts through their friendship or connections to the owners of these colleges. It is time for a full government inspection to check on student attendance, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the number of people in senior positions in these colleges who have no relevant experience and hold their positions through family or other connections and the amount of plaigerism revealed through such programs ass Turnitin. Qualifications awarded by these colleges and Degrees awarded by the Universities associated with these colleges are an insult to every genuine student who honestly studies for their degrees across the country.