We recently hailed the death of a school majoring in foreign students, Stratford University, as a victory for those of us who do not want to see needless numbers of (frankly not very talented) migrant students using their F-1 visas to enter the American labor market.
While this is an appropriate response, I have heard more recently there is a terrible side-effect for some citizens and green card-holding former students of Stratford, which operated in northern Virginia, suggesting that such marginal institutions should not be allowed to exist in the first place.
My informant was a nursing student at Stratford; when it collapsed, its nursing students were turned over to Chamberlain University College of Nursing, another for-profit institution. But Chamberlain, in a move said to be typical of the for-profit nursing schools, would honor only half of the academic credits earned at Stratford, meaning that my informant would have to re-do about one and a half years of her education. This would be expensive both in terms of money and time and she said (the lady is in her forties) that she could not afford it.
Stratford’s demise is linked to the death throes of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, an organization that, in effect, gave licenses to marginal schools to operate and to cause the admission of foreign students, many of whom come to the United States not to study but to work. ACICS is on its way out of business because of a decision by the Biden administration, as we reported earlier, but the harm that it has done will linger for years.
The bit of ICE that nominally regulates alien students, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, still lists four campuses of Stratford as eligible to issue the documents that lead to F-1 visas. The school has been out of business since October 1.