UK & World

Oxford, but not that Oxford: how a small commercial school suddenly became big


College recruiters walked immigrant neighborhoods, knocked on doors, or stopped people in shopping malls, selling the benefits of business school and adding a surprising proposition: Get paid to enroll.

“Money, money, money,” said Stéphane Lespizanou, a former recruiter at Oxford Business College. “Everybody said, ‘Hey, give me the money.’

News of the opportunity spread through Facebook groups and word of mouth. Entire families signed on, helping to turn a 41-student vocational school atop a Chinese restaurant into a major commercial organization. Unaffiliated with an elite school nearby, Oxford Business College now has multiple campuses and more than 8,000 students. That transformation brought its owners millions of dollars, company records show.

Years of free market change in British higher education have created opportunities for for-profit schools such as Oxford Business College. Thanks to opaque partnership agreements with state-funded universities, schools are able to offer undergraduate degrees and access student aid from the British government. Some are marketed as a way to easily earn a degree and get quick cash in the form of government loans of about $16,000 a year to live on.

“Go to university with no qualifications and receive up to £18,500,” says one Facebook ad, which does not list the school, only a phone number and a sum of money of around $23,000. Dozens of similar anonymous posts appear in Facebook groups for Eastern Europeans in Britain.

“Do you want to study at the easiest university in the UK?” another ad asks. “Do you need some extra income?”

Higher education experts say partnerships between publicly funded universities and for-profit schools such as Oxford Business College can prepare older students and those in underserved areas for better careers. Oxford Business College offers two days a week for working students and others who choose non-traditional pathways to higher education. Some students said the college offers opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have, and a national student survey showed high approval ratings.

Many of the partnerships are new, and it’s hard to tell if they’re helping students land higher-paying jobs after graduation. The data, in general, is nebulous.

All that is clear is that schools are making money in a fast-growing corner of Britain’s world-renowned university system with little oversight. Regulators say the system is vulnerable to exploitation.

Oxford Business College has at least three partnership deals with accredited, publicly funded universities. Every new student accepted under these deals means tuition money for both the college and its publicly funded partner.

That created huge incentives for students to enroll, former recruiters and interviewers recall. The recruiters, known as “sales managers,” said they were paid based on how many students they enrolled. Some students who struggled to speak English were admitted, according to more than a dozen students and former staff members.

According to internal reports from interviewers who tested applicants’ English, even those applicants who plagiarized answers on entrance tests were given a second chance or, in at least one case, were nominated for admission.

“He copied and pasted his answer from an online source,” one interviewer wrote in a text message to his supervisor.

“Skip it,” she replied.

Many students said they were excited about the opportunity to learn business principles and improve their English. But others wondered how they would pay off their loans and whether the school was adequately preparing them for good jobs. Interviewers wondered whether the students they passed could benefit from higher education with such a lenient approach.

“I thought to myself, this man is going to have a hard time,” said Jake Smith, a former interviewer. “But since I’ve been told from above that I must, I’ll skip them.”

Oxford Business College declined repeated interview requests for months. In written responses to questions, the school said it offers educational opportunities to diverse students. It has solid admissions standards that match its peers and rejects 60 percent of applicants, said the school’s principal and co-owner Padmesh Gupta.

U October fraud risk memoEngland’s higher education regulator, the Office for Students, said partnership agreements were at risk of exploitation. “Students may be registered without proper validation of their language qualifications and skills,” it said. Students can pocket housing loans, it adds, “with no intention of significant learning.”

The debate over for-profit colleges is a common one in the United States. In England, they appeared quite recently, after changes that made the system of higher education more similar to the American one.

But the rules that exist in the United States do not apply in England. For example, Oxford Business College offered its students a “golden ticket” of £250, about $310, to anyone they referred who enrolled. This practice is prohibited in the United States.

One student said she referred dozens of people, including her husband. He said he didn’t go to class and signed up for public assistance. His wife said she did his schoolwork. The college said it has high attendance figures.

This business model is successful in large part because of the way England funds higher education. In the past, universities were mostly free and funded through direct government spending. That money is steadily being replaced by tuition and student loans.

These loans cover tuition and living expenses for students who must repay the money only after earning $34,000 a year.

Experts say it’s a good thing for schools to tell low-income students the money is there. But the money should be seen as a way to fund education, they said, not as a point of entry.

At Oxford Business College, this distinction was not always clear. One student even pulled out her bank card at school while waiting to pay on the spot, recalls Antonina Pilade, a former visual content producer for the college.

“I couldn’t understand anymore,” he said. “Are we a bank or a college?”

The New University of Buckinghamshire, the state-funded school with which the partnership helped transform the Oxford Business College in 2019, said it had seen “no evidence of wrongdoing” but had suspended recruitment at the college and appointed staff to monitor recruitment and academic programmes.

The University of West London, another partner, said it was confident its Oxford Business College students met the same admissions standards. University of London Ravensbourne, the third partner, did not respond to questions.

In a brief telephone interview, Titiksha Shah, a dress designer who owns 60 percent of Oxford Business College, said she did not know how the school operated on a day-to-day basis.

In recent years, she said, it has changed to become a “state-funded college.”

Partnerships between state-funded universities and other schools, known as franchise arrangements, have been possible in Britain for many years. But only recently have they become so profitable for colleges and a lifesaver for universities, experts say.

That’s because direct government aid has almost run out and tuition is capped by law. Universities, especially those unable to attract higher-paying international students, are struggling to make ends meet.

“The market has become much more competitive and desperate,” said Mark Leach, founder of Wonkhe, a higher education research organization in England. He called the almost unchecked proliferation of for-profit schools through franchising a policy failure that will ultimately have to be reckoned with.

Ninety thousand full-time students were enrolled under franchise arrangements last academic year. According to the Office of Student Affairs, that number has nearly tripled in four years.

Affiliate deals are not reviewed by regulators, and academic data is not broken down by franchise agreements, making it difficult to identify student performance. There is no public record of how many students each partnership has or who the partners are. The Office of Student Affairs said Thursday it is working to improve partnership data to help improve regulation.

Neither school would discuss the terms of their deals.

In the year before the deal with Buckinghamshire, Oxford Business College had about £25,000 in the bank and Buckinghamshire was in a deficit, corporate records show. The following year, Oxford Business College had more than £1m on hand and Buckinghamshire was in surplus, thanks to a wider growth strategy that included franchising, records show.

Under these arrangements, Oxford Business College students will receive a degree from a partner university.

Laura Faria, the former director of sales, said she began downplaying the money in her presentations, fearing it would tarnish the school’s reputation. Soon, she said, she didn’t need to advertise at all.

“People were just pulling each other up,” she recalled.

Oxford Business College said it was selling the loans because many first-generation students had no idea the money was available. Many students are immigrants, living and working in Britain legally.

Students entering Oxford Business College complete what is known as a foundation year, which helps them prepare for their undergraduate programme. But they still have to meet English language requirements. Internal reports indicate that interviewers tried to respect these standards, and the school offered free language classes to help unsuccessful applicants reapply.

But Mr Smith, a former interviewer, said: “I was told quite clearly that the more students a college gets, the more funding they get, so I shouldn’t be so harsh.”

Last summer, Mr. Smith sent his supervisor this excerpt from an essay on admission: “Whomen mi wife en wi thinking to get him at a yesterday to UK, when I si his education I oz very happy, because my mama well him hill.”

The invigilator, Taiyaba Zia, told him to let the student pass if he had otherwise scored well. Mr Smith said he had already turned him down and apologised.

These days, the school offers videos with grammatically incorrect titles such as “Why is Alex so lucky?” and “Elizabeth Has a Dream.”

The benefits of a higher education at Oxford Business College are hard to overestimate. Students who entered in 2019 are just graduating.

However, everything is fine at school. He earned around £6m in 2022 and had around £15m in the bank, according to records.

In interviews, some students said they were satisfied with their teachers and the program.

“It’s an amazing thing to have a university degree,” said Loredana Stana, a student from Romania. She said she studied the principles that helped her run her beauty salons. She, her partner, her uncle and his wife studied at Oxford Business College, she said.

Others said it was difficult to develop when classmates only attended classes for money or struggled with English.

“Some of the people in the class—they didn’t speak English at all at first,” said Lydia Ley, a third-year student from East Timor. “What kind of university is this? We were wondering what was going on here. Like, the university just wants to make money?”

Ms Lay will graduate this year with a degree in business management from New Buckinghamshire University. She questioned whether her education was worth the debt and whether it had prepared her for a good career.

“I’m very worried,” she said. “How am I going to get a job like this?”

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