Degrees of Injustice: The Criminalization of Students of Color in Higher Education
By Alessandra Bazo Vienrich, Ph.D. and Krista McQueeney, Ph.D.
Recently, higher education has seen both sides of a very ugly coin. In 2019, the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, in which 33 parents of college applicants paid over $25 million to inflate test scores and bribe officials for their children to gain admission to 11 elite colleges and universities, was exposed. Meanwhile, these same institutions are becoming too expensive for first-generation and low-income students. In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled race-based affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional. These cases help to contextualize what emerged on September 9th when The Brown and White, Lehigh University’s newspaper, reported that four international students from Ghana were charged with submitting fraudulent high school transcripts when they applied to Lehigh in 2021 and 2022. While the Department of State has corroborated the discrepancies in the transcripts, questions about why Lehigh officials reported the students to law enforcement and the nature of the evidence remain unanswered.
As of this writing, the four international students — now tagged the “Lehigh Four” — have been expelled and are being held at a county jail while their friends attempt to raise bail set at $100,000 for each student. Charges of forgery and theft of services, likely second-degree felonies, have been filed against them.
While the outcome has yet to be determined, the case already differs from the Varsity Blues scandal in several key ways. First of all, under our crimmigration system, any immigrant, with the exception of naturalized citizens, convicted of a crime is subject to deportation. Since the students are facing criminal charges, they will likely be siphoned into the prison-to-deportation pipeline, making their return to the U.S. improbable even if they aren’t convicted. Second, unlike the wealthy Varsity Blues defendants, who leveraged high-priced lawyers, consultants, and doctors in their legal defense, it appears that the four Ghanaian students and their families lack the financial means to build a strong defense. The fact that the “Lehigh Four” cannot afford bail puts them at significantly higher risk for conviction (Reiman & Leighton, 2023). Third, while the students await their day in court, they have literally transformed into four of the hundreds of thousands of Black individuals who are locked up in pretrial detention for crimes they haven’t been convicted of. The “Lehigh Four” are caught up in a criminal processing system that strips them of protected status as international students and puts them at higher risk for criminalization in the future (Prins, 2019). Already, the “Lehigh Four” face greater barriers to justice than the affluent, predominantly white and Asian American defendants in the Varsity Blues case.
Importantly, international students like the “Lehigh Four” are subject to different legal regulations than U.S.-born students of color and undocumented students, students with temporary protected status (TPS), and students with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). Yet, their lived experiences as college students are often similar. For example, international students can work only in their area of study during and after college. Students with TPS or DACA face similar restrictions if their two-year-at-a-time work authorization cards are not renewed. Additionally, students with TPS and DACA are only allowed to apply for travel abroad permits (known as “advanced parole”) for education, work, and family reasons. Meanwhile, international students must return to their countries if they are no longer full-time students in a degree-bearing program at a school authorized to accept international students. Additionally, racialized international students are often subject to similar types of surveillance and criminalization as U.S.-born students of color. College student status does not exempt racialized students — U.S.-born or foreign nationals — from the suspicion and double standards routinely imposed on marginalized groups in the United States.
Why are the “Lehigh Four” being criminalized?
Studies show that over 60% of U.S. college students admit to cheating in some form. Yet, criminalizing students for academic misconduct is extremely rare. Why are the “Lehigh Four” being criminalized?
As our scholarship on undocumented students and students of color in higher education has taught us, Lehigh’s actions don’t take place in a vacuum. They represent a much more disturbing trend in higher education: the criminalization of students of color — including international students and those with precarious legal statuses — while U.S. nationals, often wealthy and/or white, are given second chances.
Typically, when students violate university codes of conduct — especially if they are privileged students and/or athletes — they are steered into the student conduct process. Unlike the criminal justice process, they receive more lenient, short-term punishments and elude the mark of a criminal record. Even within the student conduct process, students of color are punished more harshly than white students. A recent study of 4,761 disciplinary cases over seven years found that college students from underrepresented racial groups and non-citizen visa status received significantly higher charges and sanctions than their white peers — even when white students were convicted of more serious violations (Robey, Dunn, Haskins & Dickter, 2022).
For a contrast, an incident occurred on another Pennsylvania campus three days before the “Lehigh Four” story broke. On September 6th, a white male swimmer at Gettysburg College carved the “N” word on a Black teammates’ chest with a box cutter at a campus party. While the incident was called a “hate crime,” it was handled in the non-criminal student conduct process. The offender left the school after the investigation found him responsible, but the College “declined to comment on whether the student was expelled or decided to leave, citing student privacy laws” (Kim, 2024). The name of the student has been kept private as per the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Because the “Lehigh Four” were steered into the criminal justice process, they were accorded no such privacy or leniency.
So, why were the Ghanaian students targeted for investigation in the first place? Lehigh’s Brown and White quotes an admissions officer who said the investigation was triggered by suspicions of Henry Dabuo’s brother, Jude Dabuo, who had been admitted and was ready to enter Lehigh this fall. Only then, apparently, did staff note that Jude was 25 years of age. Finding this odd, they scrutinized his application more closely. Discovering formats, markings, and spelling errors that staff deemed suspicious, Lehigh rescinded Jude’s admission. At that point, staff reportedly verified the transcripts of Jude’s brother, Henry Dabuo, and his friends Otis Opoku, Evans Oppong, Cyrilsan Nombon Sowah-Nai, all of whom were enrolled at Lehigh. They found similar markings, format, and spelling errors. According to University Communications, “fraud committed to obtain admission and financial aid is a felony.” Thus, the university reported the students to federal law enforcement.
Certainly, the State only prosecutes if they believe they have proof beyond a reasonable doubt. However, it seems that the “Lehigh Four” were targets of special suspicion. What might account for this?
Overblown fears of student visa fraud in higher education are not new. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE conducted a sting on the “University of Farmington,” a fake university they set up to expose student visa fraud. While agents found evidence of over 600 students entering the U.S. under false pretenses and/or overstaying their visas, the entire operation was based on predatory tactics and bad actors, weaponizing higher education as a form of entrapment and a mask to deceive the vulnerable. The case has been unfairly used to fuel suspicion of international and undocumented students for cheating. We argue, however, that the sting says more about the growth of a racialized surveillance apparatus in higher education that criminalizes students of color and those with precarious legal statuses.
It is precisely this racialized surveillance apparatus that facilitated the criminalization of the “Lehigh Four.” As Bazo Vienrich argues in her forthcoming book, Conditioned to DREAM: The Broken Promises of Higher Education for Undocumented Latinx Students (UNC Press), undocumented Latinx students are conditioned to dream in college as a way to make their families proud, become somebody, and chase what she calls the promise of personhood. Yet, many of these students felt misled as they approached graduation, when they realized that the Dream they were sold was a fallacy. Just as higher education is failing to deliver on its promises of success, citizenship, and personhood for undocumented students of color, Lehigh is failing the “Lehigh Four.”
What can we do?
Before our eyes, the long arm of the criminal injustice system is colonizing higher education in ways that are intentional, immoral, and completely avoidable. The “Lehigh Four” case underscores the harms of imposing color-blind policies in a society rife with racial and ethnic inequalities. Even if we agree that students should be held accountable for cheating, their missteps can be made into teachable moments without surrendering them to a criminal processing system that is, for many, not only unjust but spirit-killing. The bottom line is that the “Lehigh Four” would probably not have been punished as harshly (or possibly not at all) if they were not international students with African ancestry.
As educators, it is urgent that we consider the lives and futures of all students and how seemingly arbitrary decisions like these can crush them completely. If we strive to engage in the practice of care, as articulated by bell hooks (1994), our highest calling must include “sharing in the intellectual and spiritual growth of [our] students.” We must not stand silent as institutions of higher education privilege profits over people and foster a system that dehumanizes all of us.
Alessandra Bazo Vienrich, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rhode Island College. She is the author of Conditioned to DREAM: The Broken Promises of Higher Education for Undocumented Latinx Students (UNC Press; forthcoming) and a Lehigh University alumna (MA ‘14).
Krista McQueeney, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology & Criminology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. She teaches and writes about the school-to-prison pipeline and the criminalization of marginalized populations.