Visas revoked for over 100 Chinese students at local university over falsified academic documents

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Visas for more than 100 Chinese students scheduled to graduate at a local university here in July have been revoked after authorities found that the academic credentials they had submitted were falsified.

It was recently confirmed that the students, all enrolled at Honam University in Gwangju, had their visas canceled by the Gwangju Immigration Office in January during the winter break. Most of them were graduate students and several were undergraduates who transferred from other schools.

Most of the students were visiting their home country at the time their visas were canceled, preventing their reentry to Korea. Five more who stayed in Korea during the winter break received departure orders, and four of them have since departed voluntarily.

The university said it sent out an urgent notice ahead of the new semester advising the students preparing to return to Korea to delay their entry, warning they could face deportation upon arrival at the airport.

The university explained that it relies on internationally recognized certification systems, such as apostilled documents — a form of government-issued certification — to verify academic credentials when admitting international students.

“It is not feasible for universities to individually verify every diploma, so we rely on internationally certified documents such as apostilles,” a Honam University official said.

“The students in question were admitted after their documents were verified through this process, and the Ministry of Justice and the immigration office also granted visas based on those documents. The university is also taken aback by the situation.”

As the number of international students continues to grow, initial screening responsibilities have increasingly been handled by universities. Against this backdrop, the justice ministry says that universities bear the responsibility for failing to properly verify submitted documents.

However, legal ambiguity remains over universities’ role in verifying student credentials.

“ While universities are required to report and manage international students’ academic status, the law and its enforcement decree do not clearly assign them responsibility for checking key visa requirements — such as verifying whether academic degrees are genuine — at the D-2 (student) visa application stage,” said Kim Beom-su, an immigration attorney and affiliated professor at Hanyang University.

The Ministry of Justice sign is displayed on a building in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province. Korea Times file

In response to an inquiry by The Korea Times on the cancellation, the ministry said suspicions were raised after it identified hundreds of cases in which students had obtained undergraduate degrees from the same U.S. university during a similar period.

“It raised suspicions when several hundred students reported obtaining bachelor’s degrees from the same U.S. university around the same time,” an official at the justice ministry said. “It was later found that those students had not been in the U.S. during that period, prompting a full-scale investigation.”

The students’ degrees were ultimately confirmed to have been falsified, and the ministry immediately revoked their visas.

The immigration office also stated that the measures were taken in accordance with the Immigration Act, adding that a detailed investigation into the case is currently underway.

Honam University said it will fully cooperate with the ongoing investigation, while also conducting a legal review and preparing a response proportional to the situation.

Concerns are also emerging over structural limitations in managing the rapidly growing number of international students.

In practice, these responsibilities are often left to university international offices, where a small number of staff members handle administrative work for a large volume of international students.

“Structurally, most universities simply do not have enough personnel to carry out the level of thorough verification that is required,” Kim said.

“If a diploma was found to be forged, it would be difficult to say that the university bears no responsibility. Even so, it is also difficult to accept the justice ministry's claim that universities bear full responsibility for verifying degree certificates — a core requirement for the issuance of a D-2 visa — when that responsibility has effectively been shifted onto them without any legal basis.”