📰 From the news · Fake admission / seat promise
A thousand MBAs, no classes and exams with no ID check: the Collegium Humanum "diploma factory", the 55 people charged, and why a private university's own paperwork proves nothing
Collegium Humanum was a licensed private university in Warsaw with branches in several Polish cities and campuses abroad. In February 2024 Poland's anti-corruption bureau, the CBA, raided its offices and detained its senior officers, including the rector, identified in court reporting as Paweł C.
According to University World News, investigators alleged the university sold MBA diplomas to members of the political, military and business elite, qualifications that in Poland can entitle the holder to sit on the boards of state-owned companies. Rzeczpospolita reported that more than a thousand MBA diplomas may have been issued, bringing in over a million złoty. Newsendip reported that the investigation found degrees in other programmes awarded with no classes or examinations at all, and online examinations that did not ask for proof of identity. Prosecutors charged those detained with running a criminal organisation to issue false documents certifying completion of postgraduate studies. Poland Insight reported that 55 suspects had been charged by 2025, on corruption, forgery and fraud counts, and the case has since reached as far as a serving ambassador.
Collegium Humanum did not run a medical school, and it is on this site for a structural reason. It was not a fake university. It had a licence, a rector, buildings, a website, student records and diplomas with every stamp in order, and it is now described by prosecutors as a diploma factory. Every document a student could have asked it for would have been genuine, because the institution itself was the forger.
The lesson for anyone shopping for a degree abroad is that the institution's own papers are never the check. The check is the external one: the accreditation agency's current list, the professional regulator's recognition, and, for medicine, whether graduates are actually being registered and licensed in the country you intend to practise in. A Polish MBA that "needed no classes" was sold for years to people who never asked that question.
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This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.