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Prasanth Goinaka was shot and killed in a robbery which occurred at an Oklahoma City convenience...

With his new student visa, Prasanth Goinaka was on a path toward his dream: an MBA from an American university in the heart of Silicon Valley.

That's why his parents back in India were stunned when their 28-year-old son was killed while manning a cash register at a convenience store in Oklahoma City -- 1,500 miles from campus.

A Bay Area News Group investigation has found that Goinaka -- as well as thousands of other foreign students enrolled in schools here -- probably should not have been in the country at all. They're being lured by unaccredited universities that promise help getting a prized student visa. But it turns out that these universities' legal right to assist with visas is in question.

Once here, students like Goinaka often have to go to extraordinary lengths to pay the bill.

But how he ended up losing his life halfway across the country from San Jose's International Technological University is part of a much larger story of the U.S. government's failure to catch up to a growing problem in America's higher education system.

Little-known and less-watched, a group of schools -- including San Jose's ITU, Sunnyvale's Herguan University and until recently Pleasanton's now-shuttered Tri-Valley University -- are building lucrative businesses by assembling