With his new student visa, Prasanth Goinaka was on a path toward his dream: an MBA from an American university in the heart of Silicon Valley.

That’s why his parents back in India were stunned when their 28-year-old son was killed while manning a cash register at a convenience store in Oklahoma City — 1,500 miles from campus.

A Bay Area News Group investigation has found that Goinaka — as well as thousands of other foreign students enrolled in schools here — probably should not have been in the country at all. They’re being lured by unaccredited universities that promise help getting a prized student visa. But it turns out that these universities’ legal right to assist with visas is in question.

Once here, students like Goinaka often have to go to extraordinary lengths to pay the bill.

But how he ended up losing his life halfway across the country from San Jose’s International Technological University is part of a much larger story of the U.S. government’s failure to catch up to a growing problem in America’s higher education system.

Little-known and less-watched, a group of schools — including San Jose’s ITU, Sunnyvale’s Herguan University and until recently Pleasanton’s now-shuttered Tri-Valley University — are building lucrative businesses by assembling student bodies comprised almost entirely of student-visa holders. Yet, the newspaper’s investigation found none of the schools meet the criteria necessary to assist foreign students to come here: They are neither accredited nor do their credits transfer to recognized universities.

“Universities like Tri-Valley are causing an enormous surge of international students,” said Mohan Nannapaneni, secretary of the Milpitas-based Telugu Association of North America. The Indian nonprofit group raised $5,465 to ship Goinaka’s body to his distraught parents and donated legal help to 155 traumatized Tri-Valley students, some tagged with electronic tracking devices when the federal government shut down the school on visa fraud charges.

“Why are we putting immigration authority into (these) “… universities’ hands?” Nannapaneni said.

University officials deny any wrongdoing.

But records reviewed by the newspaper tell a different story about the schools’ actions, and suggest the government and even the students themselves are to blame for the problem.

Government approved

A decade after terrorists in the country on student visas carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security — the very agency established to oversee a tougher visa system — endorses universities that should be ineligible to issue the necessary certificate for students to gain F1 student visas, records show. It even places these schools on the list that international students consult before pursuing a degree in the U.S.

Tri-Valley University was on that list even as federal agents were raiding the school in January on widespread allegations of visa fraud and alien harboring that left 1,500 foreign students in legal limbo and sparked violent protests in India.

“It is having approval I thought it is good university,” former Tri-Valley computer science student Harsha Sri, 25, said in an email. He paid $2,700 to attend less than a month’s worth of classes and is now back in India.

Tri-Valley demonstrates the riches that can be made from turning a school into a visa mill. When federal agents finally caught on, they discovered that the unaccredited school had been paid millions of dollars by foreigners to obtain student visas that authorize them to remain in the U.S. — a scheme whose growth was fueled by a profit-sharing system that gave students who referred newcomers from abroad a 20 percent cut of the tuition, according to court records.

Something else authorities found suspicious: More than 550 students enrolled in the Alameda County university were registered as living at the same address: a two-bedroom apartment on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale.

Call for crackdown

So how do schools that exist to provide student visas get away with it? U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and other lawmakers are exploring just that, and they’re beginning to demand answers. “These sham universities “… operate solely for the purpose of manipulating immigration law to admit foreign nationals into the country,” Feinstein and three other senators wrote in a March letter to Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that cited the Tri-Valley University allegations.

Questions have been raised about ITU and Herguan, but those schools haven’t been charged criminally and haven’t been accused of the same conduct.

In the case of the two Silicon Valley universities, their applications to enroll foreigners with student visas appear to misrepresent the facts. Both claimed that their credits were accepted by accredited schools. But when pressed by the newspaper, neither school could support that assertion. Still, the applications were accepted by the government, and both schools have been given clearance to issue the certificates needed for students to get visas.

While the Department of Homeland Security refused to answer questions about specific schools, it provided the newspaper both ITU’s and Herguan’s visa program applications in response to a public records request. The documents showed:

Herguan’s application states that it is accredited by the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education — an agency that has no accrediting authority. The Sunnyvale-based school also states that its coursework is accepted by other recognized schools but provided no proof on its application, nor any proof when pressed by the newspaper. In an email response, Richard Friberg, the school’s vice president, said “this is a competitive market, releasing the names of the schools will cause the receiving schools to withdraw their letters since they do not want it known that they are supporting schools that are yet to be accredited. … you are not going to get HGU to expose the other schools.”