Dozens of students clashed with police and security staff at the Nanjing School of Applied Technology in eastern China last month after discovering their nursing course only provided a degree in home economics. Photo: Weibo
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https://scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3009358/fake-degree-scandal-prompts-china-wide-fraud-check People & Culture
Fake nursing degree scandal prompts China-wide fraud check
- Investigation follows violent protest at Nanjing school
- Students discovered qualification was actually a home economics degree
An investigation into enrolment practices at eastern China’s Nanjing Institute of Applied Technology has been widened into a country-wide check for similar frauds. Photo: Handout
A protest by technical school students over fake degrees that led to a clash with police in eastern China last month has prompted the Ministry of Education to order local governments across the country to check for similar frauds in their regions.
Wang Jiping, director of the ministry’s vocational education department, said the authorities had long been cracking down on fraudulent promotions in student enrolment – the cause of the disturbance at the Nanjing School of Applied Technology.
“But some schools still irresponsibly cheated parents and students,” Wang said on Wednesday.
“For this kind of phenomenon, our attitude is one of firmly stopping and seriously punishing.”
In a statement on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging service, the city government in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, said on Tuesday that the rally by students and parents at the school had attracted the attention of city and provincial authorities.
Investigations showed that when the school enrolled new students for its home economics major in 2016, it promised they would receive associate degrees and a nursing certificate upon graduation. The students were also guaranteed jobs.
Students about to graduate this summer were angry when they learned the school could not fulfil any of its promises.
At the end of last month, some parents started petitioning the local government. On the evening of April 26, dozens of students clashed with police and security staff, with two students sustaining leg injuries. Police took several people away for “stirring up trouble among students”, the police said on Weibo.
The city government said that, after the intervention of its education and human resources departments, 405 out of the 409 affected students had been transferred to higher level institutions, with the consent of the students and their parents.
The investigation was continuing and school officials would be held accountable, it said.
The Nanjing government said some people had spread rumours online after the incident. The government statement said two people, both surnamed Wang, had falsely claimed in an article published on Monday that a female student was beaten to death by school staff and her parents knocked unconscious by police in the incident.
The pair also claimed that the school’s security guards were armed during the confrontation with students.
The claims went viral and the authors – one from Wuhan, Hubei province, and the other in Changsha, Hunan province, both in central China – were detained for causing trouble. According to the government statement, they confessed to cooking up the rumour to attract online traffic and solicit rewards from readers.
They made 32,000 yuan (US$4,700) from the article.