About 500 Chinese students arrived recently at the Comme un Chinois à Paris, a private language school in the French capital, to find they were locked out of their classrooms.

The police had detained the principal and suspended the school's operations following an office raid on March 1.

The principal had been accused of falsifying legal documents to secure visas for the students, who came from all over China, and is still under police investigation. The future of the school remains to be decided.

The Chinese Embassy in Paris has helped to find new schools for some students and others are being sought, the embassy's Dai Tianhua told China Daily on Tuesday.

Some may need to review or extend their residents permits, but all are expected to stay to resume and complete their studies, Dai said. They are paying for their own accommodation.

Chinese students at the school were legally required to provide registration documents and course plans for one full year of study in order to obtain visas. Comme un Chinois à Paris, in a bid to attract more students, offered such documents to students while only requiring them to pay three to six months' tuition.

It is unclear what financial losses the students incurred, but China's Ministry of Education (MOE) has posted alerts on its website -- the first of its kind for this year -- warning overseas students to be cautious.

The number of poor-quality language schools is increasing as unscrupulous operators seek to cash in on Chinese students eager to be educated overseas.

Cen Jianjun, deputy director of the MOE's International Cooperation and Exchange Department, warned those en route or planning to attend foreign schools about the pitfalls, saying, "Some overseas institutions with dubious qualifications and China-based agents will do anything to make a quick buck."

Reports of students being marooned overseas after being fleeced out of their money are becoming more common. Some institutions fail to match the descriptions in their recruiting brochures.

In one recent incident, a small school in Berkeley, California, gave the impression in the information it sent out to overseas applicants that studying there was tantamount to attending the world-famous University of California at Berkeley. Students received a harsh lesson when they arrived to find a single building tucked in a cul-de-sac staffed by half a dozen part-time teachers.

In New Zealand, where international students help sustain a US$1.7 billion industry, some 140 language schools do brisk business. But sudden, recent closures have left hundreds of Chinese students out in the cold.

Now a list of qualified and vetted schools in 21 countries is available on the MOE's website. "For those schools not on the list, we suggest that you seek independent information from reputable sources," Cen said.

Most applicants receive information only from agencies whose job it is to sell the schools they represent.

Cen called on all students planning to study abroad to be vigilant and to report misleading ads.

(China Daily March 16, 2005)