In 2014, NPU paid recruiters in India upward of $1.7 million to draw Indian applicants. In 2015, that sum went up to $8,00,000 for one term alone. NPU also pays recruiters a cut of each student's first-year fees.

Courtney McCallion, who was an NPU admissions officer in 2015, told BuzzFeed News she was processing dozens of applications a day for at least a month, virtually all of them from India. At that pace, she could do little more than glance at students’ test scores to check that they appeared proficient in English and see if they had graduated above the 60th percentile.