When Chay Chan responded to a social media ad promoting training certificates he had no idea he would become embroiled in an unfolding scandal sweeping the $7 billion a year private college sector that involves dodgy operators, bogus qualifications and financial fraud.
Behind the slick websites and promises of a world-class education a shadow industry has thrived — one where colleges and migration and education agents have spent decades exploiting the system. Vulnerable domestic and international students are targeted with false promises and the lure of a job. Some are complicit.
Some of them are criminal networks, others are less sophisticated shonks hoping to make a quick buck, selling fake qualifications from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per student.
Christine Nixon, who authored the Rapid Review into the Exploitation of Australia’s Visa System in March 2023, says some colleges are complicit in people coming to Australia illegally.
“I found particular nationalities who exploit their own nationalities,” she says.
Nixon made 34 recommendations focusing on strengthening regulations, improving enforcement, and addressing vulnerabilities in the visa system to prevent exploitation, particularly of migrant workers.
Christine Nixon undertook last year’s Rapid Review into the Exploitation of Australia’s Visa System. (ABC News: Margaret Burin)
Over the past year, the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA) has ramped up enforcement, cancelling the registrations of 51 private colleges in the year to June 2024 — a 34 per cent increase from the previous year. In the six months to December 31, 2024, another 28 were deregistered.
Among them, four colleges were responsible for the cancellation of over 21,000 qualifications in critical sectors like childcare, aged care, and community services.
Notably, three of them were domestic colleges.
Millions wasted on worthless diplomas
For the 18,750 students whose qualifications were revoked, it meant millions of dollars wasted on now-worthless diplomas. Chan is one of them.
Industry insiders say it is just the beginning as the regulator continues to sharpen its focus after receiving increased government funding in 2023 to improve the quality and integrity of Vocational Educational Training (VET), including $33.3 million to establish an integrity unit and a tip-off line.
Since the tip-off line became operational in October 2023, ASQA says it has received more than 3,000 leads, with more than 50 per cent offering detailed information. The integrity unit has undertaken 113 unannounced raids on providers offering training and assessment to overseas students.
Chan wasn’t surprised when he learned that Luvium was one of the providers caught up in the mess.
He came across Luvium in October 2023 when he received a diploma that he didn’t apply for. He had been dealing with a third-party provider that claimed to work with multiple colleges. He was seeking a Certificate in Training and Assessment to help him get a job teaching English in regional Australia.
People who take shortcuts to work in aged care or childcare have the potential to do a lot of damage, Chay Chan says. (ABC News: Tyrone Dalton )
“I have previous experience teaching English and computers at community organisations,” Chan says. “I see it as a great way to give back and help guide young people and others through lifelong learning.”
He believed a formal qualification would help him secure teaching work, so he pursued Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) — a legitimate process used by TAFEs, private and community training providers to assess existing skills and award qualifications. But the process is easily rorted.
The company Chan was dealing with, Get Certified Australia, assured him they could use the RPL process to qualify him for a Certificate in Training and Assessment. He transferred them $2,000, supplied various documents and references and waited.
Within weeks, he received a Diploma of Community Services issued by Luvium along with a separate record of results, listing subject units he had supposedly enrolled in and passed.
Over a series of WhatsApp messages with a representative of Get Certified Australia, who called himself Ameer, Chan was given a range of excuses and apologies and told: “Listen we already paid $2,000 to college. For diploma of community services.”
Chan realised he wasn’t going to get a refund or the correct certificate.
In one exchange the representative said: “Any other qualifications do you need.” Chan says he didn’t take the offer seriously and replied, “PhD,” to which the representative responded: “PhD in psychology…I can help to make money online. Do you have soft skills. Future billionaire investor in cryptocurrency.”
Communications ceased when Chan posted a message in the WhatsApp thread stating that he had reported the business to the authorities. The phone number was changed, the website noted “maintenance mode is on” and the business address on the invoice Chan received turned out to be an empty office.
Rorting and other red flags
When ASQA cancelled Luvium’s registration last October after finding it had issued qualifications without appropriate training or assessment, 7,360 students were given a short window to prove that their qualifications in critical areas including childcare, community services and first aid were legitimate, or they would be cancelled. None were able to demonstrate they had the necessary training or assessment.
Chan wasn’t affected because he never used his fake Luvium diploma for work. But thousands of others were and so were the companies they worked for.
Quality College of Australia boss Richard Finlayson says the sector has had problems for decades. He estimates that one-third of private colleges do the right thing in terms of compliance, one-third are in the middle and the rest don’t care.
“They are set up with trust funds and the money ends up overseas,” Finlayson says.
Quality College of Australia managing director Richard Finlayson. (Supplied)
He says Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) is a good scheme in principle but in practice it is heavily rorted: “It is being used for quick qualifications.”
Finlayson says other red flags are colleges that offer courses much shorter than the standard duration and courses that should be practical but are delivered 100 per cent online.
“In aged care there is a skill shortage, so people are doing short courses online. The problem with that is when you aren’t being trained, what do you do if an elderly lady falls and how do you put her back on the bed? You can’t learn that online, it needs to be practical,” he says. “How can we allow this as a legitimate forum of training?”
There is evidence that some colleges falsely mark students as attending courses when they are not. For international students, this violates their visa conditions, which require a certain number of hours of face-to-face attendance.
One Chinese student was quoted in online publication VOA Chinese last November saying: “In the first half of the year, you need to go to a college… one to two days a week, and you only need to go half a day. Later, if you transfer to a private college, the school can take your attendance, so you don’t need to go at all. It’s really a gold rush.”
In September last year, an online Indian newspaper, The Tribune, published an article about the crackdown, reporting that “Hundreds of students from North India rush to these colleges every year “to take dummy admissions and instead work”, while their attendance and course certificates are taken care of”.
The scale of misconduct is staggering
ASQA told the ABC that, as of December 31, it was handling 174 serious matters including allegations of cash-for-qualifications schemes, fraud, fake diplomas, and fabricated assessments. These cases involve 138 training providers — and 103 of them cater to international students.
The scale of misconduct is staggering: 68 per cent of these serious matters involve fraud, from visa scams and funding rorts to sham RPL processes that falsely legitimize unearned qualifications. Some providers don’t deliver any actual training or assessment, while others run ghost colleges where students pay for a visa rather than an education.
“In addition to the 174 serious matters under investigation, ASQA has 84 compliance activities underway across both VET and CRICOS providers,” an ASQA spokesperson said.
There are currently 24 providers before the Administrative Review Tribunal who are appealing registration cancellation decisions. Some of these providers continue to operate while their appeal is heard, but some have conditions on them.
Some students are complicit. Some — like Chan — are not.
There is a growing perception that Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) is flawed. There is no independent verification to ensure training providers gather enough evidence to prove that applicants have the necessary skills and experience for their qualifications.
Colleges have been abusing the RPL system for years but the issue gained widespread attention in 2023 when the NSW building commissioner ordered a skills audit on construction sites after discovering some workers were buying qualifications instead of completing proper training, leading to unsafe and substandard work.
ASQA has had it on its radar for years but went public and placed RPLs as a risk priority in 2023-24. Some say it should have done it years ago.
Finlayson and other experts believe there’s a solution. “The whole industry changes overnight if a system of external assessors was introduced,” Finlayson says. “Currently colleges effectively mark their own homework.”
Currently, many registered training organisations train and assess students, creating a conflict of interest where providers are incentivised to pass students, regardless of whether they have the required skills.
A spokesman for ASQA says the regulator doesn’t support this characterisation. “The combination of training (or instruction) is intrinsic to Australia’s model of education and applies to schools, higher education and VET,” he says. But he says when there are “bad faith actors” often both training and assessment will be compromised.
“ASQA recognises this as an issue for high-risk providers and has secured MYEFO funding to develop a model to support the use of external (independent) validation of the assessment undertaken by high-risk providers,” he says. “This will be an additional regulatory tool used by ASQA moving forward.”
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Better checks and balances overseas
Claire Field, a consultant who established Australia’s first national VET regulatory agency, says countries with well-established vocational training systems tend to have more checks and balances on assessment decisions than Australia.
She says in Germany, external assessment centres run by employers and unions test students to verify that training providers have delivered proper education. The UK has “awarding bodies” with a similar oversight role, while Singapore uses Skills Assessment Centres to allow employers to have workers’ competencies independently evaluated. New Zealand’s Qualifications Authority conducts regular assessment moderation to ensure accuracy in training outcomes.
“In Australia too many people have said it’s too hard to separate training from assessment and how would we fund it?” Field says. “The reality is that for government funded training, the government funds a training provider to both deliver training and assess students. The same is true when employers or individuals pay for training. It would be easy to split these fees into a portion for the delivery of training and a separate amount for the assessment of students.”
VET and higher education consultant Claire Field. (ABC News: Greg Bigelow)
Australia already operates independent skills assessment centres, Field adds, but they are primarily used to evaluate migrants’ qualifications: “Expanding these centres for local students would strengthen training credibility and prevent the integrity issues plaguing the system.”
Life moved on for Chan and he didn’t end up teaching English in rural Australia. He is currently working on solar farms. But he worries about the private college sector and how the quality of the industry is being undermined.
“When people are able to take shortcuts to work in elderly care or childcare, they have the potential to do a lot of damage,” he says.
“Imagine someone with English as a second language gets a Diploma in Community Welfare and is looking after someone’s frail parents or grandparents at an aged care facility, and they make a mistake resulting in the death of the person they were tasked to care for… or a childcare worker.”
