Ontario’s ombudsman, investigating the abrupt closure of an unregistered private career college, said in a report released today that the Canadian province is “abjectly inept” in policing such rogue academic institutions, which can leave unwary students “out in the cold.”

André Marin’s scathing report said the province’s Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities “has no system in place for actively seeking and tracking information about illegal operators” and had never brought a single charge against an unregistered college. Ontario has the most postsecondary institutions of any Canadian province.

In the report, Mr. Marin noted that even though the provincial government knew the Bestech Academy was illegal, it subsidized the tuition there of unemployed workers to get them retrained. “My concern is not just with this one school and the ministry’s complete lack of enforcement against its brazen director, who saw herself as ‘too cool for school,’ or above the law,” he wrote in remarks released with the report. “I’m concerned about its systemic failure to enforce the rules governing private colleges — to the point that Bestech’s president told us that she essentially ignored them because so many others were doing the same thing.”

The province has accepted almost all of Mr. Marin’s recommendations, including a “buyer beware” Web site that lists illegal colleges. Ontario has about 500 career colleges that train students for a specific job or skill in many areas, including health, business, and computers, according to its Web site. The ombudsman also warned that the province must be particularly vigilant amid tough economic times, when so many people are in retraining programs paid for by taxpayers. —Karen Birchard