One of the most beloved colleges in all of sports is being investigated for faulty classes. The University of North Carolina has been providing college students who play sports with fake classes so that they can be eligible and be able to play. This is a very large problem dealing with student’s degrees. About 3,100 students who enrolled in these fake classes now have a degree.

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is reviewing a report made by Ken Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor, that shows that thousands of UNC students took fraudulent classes. Lots of them took classes multiple times. In an interview with CNN, Wainstein says, “UNC has to verify every degree they give all the time. We ask them to make sure all courses really are legitimate. All we can do is put them on sanction for lack of integrity. As far as taking those degrees back, there’s nothing we can do.”

Gerald Gurney, the president of the Drake Group for academic integrity in collegiate sports, called the UNC fraud the “largest and most nefarious academic scandal in the history of the NCAA.” Gurney believes that the NCAA should punish the university. He doesn’t think that they should lose the legitimacy of their degrees though. “Lifting diplomas from students who were advised to take these classes is nearly impossible.”

This is not the first time that UNC has been investigated. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools invested their classes when UNC told them that they existed on a much smaller scale. After the most recent investigation, the association made the school offer new classes to the students who had been enrolled in these fake classes. CNN was told by UNC that only 11 students had offered to retake a class. A professor’s assistant in the African-American studies program supposedly started theses fake classes. She did this to help out students who weren’t very good with classes. Professor Julius Nyang’oro was in on it too. He worked with advisers in the athletics department to help student athletes who didn’t have good GPA’s to still be able to play sports. Mike McAdoo, a former football player at UNC told CNN that one of his advisers told him to major in African American Studies, and then put him in a couple of these fake classes.

The University of North Carolina could be facing some serious consequences when the investigation is over. This investigation is not quite done yet. Investigators are still looking into these paper classes at UNC. Because of their reputation in college sports, they tried to keep failing student athletes GPA’s up. It is said that nearly half of the 3,100 students enrolled in fake classes were athletes.