Rocked by a recent controversy involving one of its Indian students who falsified his Board marksheets for admission and later bragged about it on Reddit, Lehigh University in the US has initiated a review of documents submitted by other international students on campus and is exploring third-party verification of academic transcripts for undergraduate admissions, a senior official told The Indian Express.
Aryan Anand, 19, submitted fabricated documents – including academic transcripts, financial statements, and a fake death certificate for his father – to secure a full scholarship at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
The elaborate fraud came to light when Anand detailed it in an anonymous Reddit post on February 23, which was discovered and pieced together by another Redditor, a 19-year-old BTech student from Faridabad.
Anand, a computer science student, was arrested on April 30 and charged with forgery, tampering with records, theft by deception, and theft of services. He pleaded guilty in Northampton County and was deported to India on August 15 this year. According to the US News and World Report rankings, Lehigh University is ranked amongst the top 50 national universities in America.
Speaking about the scandal’s impact, Dr. Sabrina Jedlicka, Deputy Provost for Graduate Education at Lehigh University — who was recently in India to promote outreach in partnership with GradRight and increase the university’s Indian student population — described the university’s reaction as one of deep emotional distress and disappointment.
“It was an emotional sadness that students we had so carefully selected from our pool had provided us with fraudulent application documents,” Jedlicka said in an interview with The Indian Express. “We trust that people, when applying to higher education, should try to get in based on their merits, as opposed to crafting that merit fraudulently. As an institution, we were devastated that these students had done this.”
“It was a very somber day on campus among the admissions teams to face this,” she added. “One of the questions you ask is, why? The attraction of receiving scholarship funds in the US to pursue an education is strong, and if you don’t have the credentials to earn that yourself, I can imagine how tempting that could be to get a leg up in the world.”
Dr. Jedlicka emphasised that the university reviews applications holistically, going beyond just school grades and values genuine contributions from prospective students.
“We want to admit people who are going to contribute to the mission of our university and the student body at large. If that message comes through in a student’s application, they can be very attractive even if their grades are slightly lower than expected. We look at everything holistically — from leadership profiles to course backgrounds, not just grades, but also the diversity of courses. I want to hear about a student’s failure moments and how those shaped their trajectory. That, to me, presents a whole human package, not just a series of numbers,” she said.
Lehigh is now taking a measured approach for future admissions, focusing on strengthening existing systems while exploring new verification methods that won’t create undue barriers for applicants.
Among the options being considered is roping in a third-party such as WES or World Education Services to vet and evaluate academic transcripts of applicants. “One of the hesitations that we’ve had with going forward with having (undergraduate) students submit a WES-evaluated transcript or an NACE-evaluated transcript is that it’s a cost to the students. And so right now we are looking to try to work with those organisations to enable those services at a lower cost to the students. That way it’s not a barrier to students having to do that, but it also then provides us with some peace of mind around the educational credentials of the students being valid.”
Asked if the Aryan Anand case had prompted the university to review documents submitted by other international students on campus, Dr. Jedlicka said, “Yes, there was a handful that we pulled and are now going through, but again, I don’t have the outcome of that. We don’t want to call any students into question, but we are doing our due diligence to ensure that this was an anomalous case.”
However, she emphasised that the incident hasn’t made the university distrustful of applicants from India. “We don’t want to distrust people that are putting in applications to the institution. We just don’t want to do that. That’s not who we are.”
India is the largest source of international students on US campuses. The Open Doors 2024 report showed that there were 3,31,000 Indian students in the US in 2023-24 (29.4 per cent of around 1.1 million international students in the US), while there were 2,77,000 Chinese students in the same year (24.6 per cent of the international student population in the US).
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