A network of Chinese agents has been charging thousands of euros to fraudulently enroll Chinese students, many of whom barely speak French, in universities in France, a university president said on Friday. Jean-Loup Salzmann, president of the University of Paris XIII, told Agence-France Presse that his institution had filed a complaint in July after discovering that 50 to 60 transcripts, representing around 10 percent of the Chinese student enrollment during the past academic year, were problematic.

Two university administrators were punished, a lecturer was referred for a disciplinary hearing, and the university has eliminated the problem, AFP reports. The news follows the arrest in September of a former president of the University of Toulon on similar charges.

On Friday, the country’s higher-education minister, Valérie Pécresse, said in an interview that France needed to “profoundly modify our system for selecting students from China, but also from all developing countries.” The overall objective, she said, remained to attract a growing number of Chinese students to French universities.

Last week, during a state visit by the Chinese premier, French President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of his desire to double to number of Chinese students in France, according to Expatica.com, an online news site.