China's education authority has issued a list of the country's 2,845 authorized institutions of higher learning, creating a buzz on the Internet and in social media among students who are due to take the national college entrance exam next month.
The 2,845 schools accredited by the Ministry of Education include 447 private, seven jointly run by Chinese and foreign universities, and 292 colleges for lifelong learning. Most Chinese institutions of higher learning are public.
The ministry issues the list every year, partly in an effort to alert the public of unauthorized "diploma mills" that are still seen in a lot of places despite repeated bans.
A commercial website based in Jiangxi province, sdaxue.com, issued a list of pseudo colleges this week－the third of its kind-naming 210 diploma mills suspected of illegal enrollment and online swindling.
Internet search engine Baidu has created a pop-up warning for people who click on the names of the 210 "institutions" on the list, of which 95 are in Beijing.
Students and parents are also able to check a university's authenticity on the Ministry of Education's website, moe.gov.cn, which publishes details of China's 2,246 authorized universities and 296 adult education institutions.
"It is very easy to check the authenticity on authoritative websites now," said Zhang Ting, a high school teacher in Beijing. "The fraudulent universities might target students and parents from rural areas and less-developed regions.
"In Beijing, universities usually open their campus before the gaokao (national higher education entrance examination) for prospective students for one day. Admission officers will answer students' questions there."
Some fake universities embed words like Beijing or China in their name to attract students, or use names very similar to authentic institutions.
Wang Zhiwei, president of a diploma mill called Beijing International Finance Academy, was sentenced to life in prison in 2013 for acquiring 36 million yuan ($5.8 million) fraudulently. Wang ran the "academy", which was shut down in 2011, for four years and cheated more than 600 students.
