NEW YORK
Study-abroad programs at 15 colleges and universities including Harvard and Columbia are being scrutinized by the New York attorney general’s office to ensure cozy deals between schools and companies that provide the programs are not cheating students, a top investigator said Monday.
Benjamin Lawsky, deputy counselor and special assistant to Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, said prosecutors are focusing on the schools after a probe of more than a dozen companies worldwide that arrange for students to study abroad for up to a year identified questionable practices.
“We have certainly found indications there are financial relationships between some study abroad providers and schools and some evidence of perks,” he said. Investigators want to know which administrators at each school are responsible and how programs are chosen, he added.
He said an example of a perk would be a program that arranged for a school administrator to stay in a city such as Rome for three weeks even though it only took four days to examine the plans for the study-abroad program there.
“That would be eyebrow raising, the kind of thing we’re examining,” he said. “At the end of the day, the people who get harmed the most by conflicts of interest on campus are middle-class students and their families who really can’t afford to pay extra for these services while the schools reap the benefits.”
He said the office had found many instances in which schools have only one company arranging the trips.
