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Jessica Custer was the editor of her high school paper growing up in Hardwick, New Jersey. She was also a member of the biology team, the chemistry team, the chess club, and the debate club. That résumé got her accepted to a whole slew of prestigious colleges, including Georgetown, Princeton, and Harvard. But in 1995, she made a different choice, one that she believed would set her up for a bright future.
“If I get my degree from Oxford, I can go to any graduate school I want,” Custer said she thought at the time. “I’m golden.”
Jen Mills lived in Redmond, Washington. Like Custer, she believed that studying at Oxford would be a transformative experience—that it was well worth the $21,000 annual tuition. “Even though I had full-ride scholarships from a couple of colleges that I had to give up in order to do it, we thought this is an academic institution that has enough prestige that it would be worth it,” she said.
Ian Schuler was from the small factory town of St. Marys, Pennsylvania. He had finished all the classes he needed to graduate high school by the end of his junior year. “I was so hungry to learn things—I wanted to go to a place that was a bastion of learning,” he said. And in April 1995, he got what he’d been hoping for: an acceptance letter from his dream school.
Dear Ian: this letter is to wish you a warm welcome to Warnborough College and to Oxford and to congratulate you on the credentials and recommendations you’re bringing to us.
That “Welcome to Warnborough College” thing didn’t raise any red flags. That’s because the University of Oxford isn’t just one institution. Oxford is made up of around 40 individual colleges, and every student attends one of them. They have separate histories, as well as their own dining facilities and residence halls. They have names like Exeter College, Lincoln College, and Hertford College.
Custer, Mills, and Schuler all got accepted to Warnborough College. And in the late summer of 1995, they set out on the trip that would change their lives.
When Custer’s flight landed in London, there was a shuttle—really, a passenger van—waiting at the airport to bring her to her new school. “It’s a bit of a distance from Heathrow,” she remembered. “And then, after driving for a while, you see Oxford and it’s like, Oh, my God—you get all excited.”
Schuler was on that shuttle too. “I recall the driver pointing out all of the things along the way as you were driving through Oxford,” he said. “These are buildings that had been around longer than our country.”
Historic Oxford dates back to medieval times, and it’s the home of the oldest university in the English-speaking world. From the windows of their shuttle, these American students could see a whole collection of beautiful, historic Oxford colleges: Exeter, Lincoln, Hertford, and more. Now it was time to find Warnborough.
Before they got to their destination, the driver made a stop in the city center to pick something up. Then, the van started rolling again. And … it just kept rolling. Soon, they realized that they were driving past Oxford, up into the hills and through a cow pasture.
“People are sort of like, Hey, where are we going? What’s going on?” Schuler said. “I think that was the time that for many people, they realized that this wasn’t exactly what they thought they were signing up for.”
The group of American teenagers believed they had fulfilled their college dreams. These students and dozens more like them had crossed an ocean to attend one of the world’s most esteemed institutions. They found themselves … somewhere else.
The story of where they ended up and who brought them there is a wild tale of international intrigue, one that confounded investigators and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic. When I started looking into this decades-old mystery, I had no idea where the trail would lead. What I found is a bunch of duped overachievers, a trail of unpaid bills, and a school president who still insists that he did nothing wrong.
This story was adapted from an episode of the One Year podcast. Evan Chung was the lead producer, Madeline Ducharme was the assistant producer, and there was additional production from Cheyna Roth. Listen to the full version:
Legend has it that, ages ago, an Oxford scholar wandered a couple of miles outside the city in search of a nice, calm place to read some Thucydides. But then, out of nowhere, a wild boar charged at the scholar. Thinking quickly, he crammed his book into the animal’s jaws, choking the beast to death. That’s how that quiet spot got its name: Boars Hill.
This was where Jessica Custer, Jen Mills, and Ian Schuler found themselves in the late summer of 1995. Their new school, Warnborough College, comprised two Boars Hill estates. One of them was the former palace of the Bishop of Oxford. The other had been the home of the United Kingdom’s chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials.
Custer was only 18, and she’d just traveled overseas on her own. She was exhausted, and confused by the fact that they weren’t actually in Oxford. She needed to get her bearings. She went to take a hot shower.
“I looked up because they had these really high ceilings, and there were at least four spiders in there that were literally tarantula-size,” she said. She decided that shower could wait for another day.
Custer went looking for the other newcomers. There were students at Warnborough from Russia, Japan, and the Middle East. But the biggest contingent was from the United States. There were more than 30 new American students at Warnborough College. That first day, some of them got together in front of the main estate.
When Custer joined that group, she heard that a couple of students who’d come to England with their parents had already trekked over to the main Oxford campus. Now she saw them coming back to Warnborough. “And I remember the girls being in tears. I was like, Oh, this is not a good sign,” she said.
The next day, Custer and two other Americans ventured out from Boars Hill on a quest for answers. Their first stop was Oxford University, where they still hoped they were enrolled. A woman in the admissions office told them the harsh truth. “She’s basically like, ‘We are really sorry that this is going on. But these people have nothing to do with us,’ ” she said.
When the Americans asked that admissions officer if they had any recourse—if there was still some hope they could go to Oxford—the answer they got back was clear and direct: absolutely not.
Not quite ready to give up, they took a bus to London and dropped in on the U.S. Consulate. But the diplomats weren’t going to rescue them either. The person Custer spoke to said that Warnborough was “not breaking any laws.” Still, the students were advised “to get out of there as soon as possible.”
That night, they stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in London and went to see a movie: The Usual Suspects. The next morning, back at Warnborough, Custer did what she’d been dreading most: She called her parents and told them what had happened.
“It took them a while to kind of grasp what was going on, because it doesn’t help when I’m hysterically crying,” she said. She said she was coming home.
When Custer got off the phone with her mom and dad, she took a minute to compose herself. Then, she demanded an audience with the man in charge: the president of Warnborough College, Dr. Brenden D. Tempest-Mogg.
Custer told Tempest-Mogg that she was leaving, and she demanded a refund. “And he’s like, ‘Well, I don’t have authorization to do that right now,’ ” she said. “So I forced him to write a letter, dated and whatever, promising me 50 percent of my money back. And I made him sign it.”
With that signed letter in hand, Custer got on a flight back to the U.S. All told, about 15 Americans would leave in the weeks that followed. That exodus would soon become a major media story, and an international education scandal.
“It was a reporter from the New York Times looking for a girl who I think had left already,” Schuler said. “That person wasn’t there, so she has to talk to me instead.”
That reporter was Sarah Lyall. She was working out of the paper’s London bureau when she got a tip about Warnborough.
“It just sounded so weird,” Lyall remembered. “We were told this was part of Oxford, and when we arrived, it was clear it wasn’t part of Oxford. It was an intriguing story because it did play right into this notion of Americans being completely snowed by something they didn’t understand.”
Schuler told Lyall that the college had misled him. Other students said they felt humiliated and angry. One kid said that he’d spent $1,500 on suits after being told that there’d be formal dinners once a week. But when he got to Warnborough, he discovered that the dining hall was just a cafeteria and there weren’t any formal dinners at all.
After her initial round of phone calls, Lyall went to check out Warnborough College for herself. “I remember being really struck by how awful it was. It was like a bad summer camp,” she said.
She also tried to interview a handful of school officials. “They didn’t want me on their campus,” she told me. “They were very, very uncomfortable. And it became clear that they didn’t want these questions asked and that they were sort of making up answers on the spot.”
Those officials told Lyall that Warnborough had never claimed to be part of Oxford University. When CBS Evening News did its own version of the story, a Warnborough representative said that any misapprehension was the American students’ fault—that they should’ve read their brochures more carefully.
CBS News seemed to agree with that takeaway. The report’s angle, in the end, was that a group of Americans had tried to sneak into Oxford through a back door. “It’s like the old joke,” the CBS reporter said in his final voice-over. “How do you get from Warnborough College to Oxford? Study harder.”
In 1995, there were two very different stories circulating about Warnborough College. A group of American students said that the school had misrepresented itself. Warnborough said the students should’ve known better.
So, what did the students know? What should they have known? And what really happened at Warnborough College?
Jen Mills, Jessica Custer, and Ian Schuler come from very different places and have very different personalities. Still, they have much in common.
All three of them excelled in school, and none of their families had much money. When it came to higher education, none of their parents had graduated from four-year colleges, and they couldn’t offer much guidance on college admissions.
Mills, Custer, and Schuler weren’t the kind of students who had private tutors. But they were all very ambitious. And they knew the value of a degree from an elite brand-name university.
That’s where it started for all of them, with the name: Oxford.
Schuler saw it when he took the SATs. “Before you even start the test, in the intro thing, you fill out the Scantron bubbles of ‘What are the schools that you want to send this to?’ And there’s a big book there that you look through to get the codes,” he said. “I saw Harvard—I’ve heard of Harvard, I’m going to put that in. MIT—I’ve heard of MIT, that’s a good school, I’m going to put that in. Then I saw the section header said Oxford. Oh, Oxford—I’ve heard of Oxford. I’ll fill that in as well.”
The school listed under that Oxford header was Warnborough College. Warnborough got the attention of Jen Mills at a college fair, when she came across a booth labeled “The Oxford Programs.” Jessica Custer got sucked in when she got a brochure in the mail. “It was an impressive packet,” she said. “Full-blown Oxford University photographs, the whole Oxford campus, talking about the library—I mean, it was the whole nine yards.”
It wasn’t just the photographs. Warnborough’s brochures had plenty of words too. One packet was titled “The Traditions of Oxford, Oxford University, and Warnborough College.” It said that “Oxford, as a place, has spawned many great colleges, scholars, and ideas.” It described the university as a “federation of … colleges and … halls, each entity having its own particular expertise.” And how did Warnborough College fit in? The brochure called it a “gateway” for international students who had been “traditionally excluded from Oxford University.”
When the New York Times’ Lyall got ahold of that brochure, she took note of that squirmy language. “I was shocked at how deceptive it was,” she said.
Still, those printed Warnborough brochures never said outright that it was a full-on University of Oxford college. But a piece of promotional material went a bit further. It was called “Inspiring the Vision,” and it was a kind of audio brochure on a compact disc. Mills, Custer, and Schuler all got that CD in the mail. So did at least 24 other American students.
It begins with the sound of bells ringing. Then, a voice-over comes in:
A great deal can happen in a thousand years, and Oxford University has seen it all. Oxford University: No other university in the world can offer the tradition, the status, the reputation that is inextricably woven into every building, every courtyard, every green common that makes up the Oxford campus.
A few moments later, there’s a line about “tomorrow’s leaders” and “the next millennium.” At one point, the narrator says Oxford five times in the span of 17 seconds. All told, Oxford gets mentioned 13 times before the first mention of Warnborough. “For over 20 years,” the narrator says, “Warnborough College has assisted overseas students to acclimatize to Oxford, enabling them to reach their full academic potential and to appreciate their Oxford opportunity.”
The narrator does note, one time, that Warnborough is an “independent institution.” But that moment passes quickly. And it’s followed by some epic name-dropping.
Mahatma Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Madame Curie, Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Gilbert Murray, and many others have all walked the halls and found a place of inspiration amongst Warnborough’s 13-acre woodland campus.
Gandhi, Einstein, Wells—none of them went to Warnborough College. They did “walk the halls,” technically, given that they were houseguests at one of the Warnborough buildings when it belonged to Gilbert Murray, a classical scholar who taught at the University of Oxford.
That rundown of non-alumni comes near the end. Here’s how it finishes up: “Inquiries from the United States of America can be made by calling toll free 1-800-95-OXFORD.”
When Jen Mills heard that CD, she played it for her parents, her friends, and her high school guidance counselor. “There wasn’t really a healthy dose of skepticism,” she said. “We just thought, Wow, this sounds pretty cool.”
Mills couldn’t afford to visit England before she made her college choice. And in 1995, doing research on a foreign school wasn’t easy. Internet access was a luxury, and there weren’t all that many resources online. “I mean, we didn’t have Google, so I was basically working off of what information I could find in the library,” she said.
Mills didn’t find anything that made her feel suspicious. But Ian Schuler did see something that gave him pause.
“I don’t know if it was in the library or where—I came across a list of the colleges that were part of Oxford, and Warnborough wasn’t on that list,” he said.
By the time Schuler saw that list of Oxford colleges, he’d already bought his ticket to England. And he still had good reason to think that Warnborough College was on the level. For one thing, it was on a list of approved schools for federal student loans. According to the United States Department of Education, Warnborough was legit. “I can get U.S. loans. It’s paid for one way or another. Let’s do it,” Jessica Custer remembered thinking.
Mills, Schuler, and Custer all took out loans to go to Warnborough. When they got to England, all three figured out very quickly that this college on Boars Hill wasn’t what they’d bargained for. But while Custer quickly flew back home, Mills and Schuler chose to stay.
“I think I felt ashamed,” Mills said. “I was afraid of freaking out my parents. I was just trying to find a way to make something out of it since I was already there.”
“It was easy to rationalize staying because school was paid for,” Schuler explained. “It was going to cost me more to leave than it was to stay. But it was also like, I didn’t want to go back to St. Marys, Pennsylvania. It was still going to be a neat adventure.”
About half of the Americans who went to Warnborough in 1995 stuck around after the first week. The students who did stay discovered something surprising: The Warnborough College experience wasn’t all bad.
Schuler told me that some of his Warnborough professors also taught at Oxford University colleges, and that “the classes were actually quite good.” Mills said that the small, seminar-style courses allowed her to get a kind of one-on-one teaching “that you wouldn’t get at a U.S. university, especially in your first year.”
Warnborough’s American students took day trips to Stonehenge and the Cotswolds. They drank cheap beer at the Oxford Union and put together a makeshift disco in a shed. And just like undergrads at the real Oxford University, they complained about the quality of the food and the upkeep of their dorms.
“It was kind of us against the administration: All right, we’re stuck in this situation. Let’s just say screw it, make the best of it,” Mills said.
Schuler mocked the Warnborough College administration in an underground newsletter called the WC, a play on the British term for a toilet. He also witnessed some minor rebellion, like when a group of students sprayed a fire hose off a balcony. “They interviewed everybody individually about the incident to try to track down who was responsible,” he said. “I did say that I was there and that I did know who had done it and that I would not tell them who it was.”
The hijinks at Warnborough didn’t last. Schuler went back to Pennsylvania before the year was over. Mills went home for her grandmother’s funeral and couldn’t afford to return to England. “I wanted to stay through the first term and at least get credit if I could have possibly transferred it,” she said. “Of course, I realized halfway through that because the school wasn’t accredited, there was no way I was going to be able to transfer credits.”
For Mills and Schuler, that was the final blow. Warnborough College, it turned out, did not have the authority to grant degrees. Those classes that they’d kind of enjoyed? They wouldn’t get credit for any of them.
Warnborough did not bring in a new batch of teenagers from the U.S. to replace the ones that came and went in 1995. Mills, Custer, and Schuler didn’t know it at the time, but they’d gotten caught up in a one-time scheme to recruit American high schoolers to Warnborough College. The man who had signed off on that plan was the school president, Brenden Tempest-Mogg.
Mills told me that she remembered Tempest-Mogg as “being very aloof”—that he was always “off in his villa [and] didn’t let himself be seen too much.”
Custer was definitely not a fan. “An absolutely arrogant prick,” she told me of Tempest-Mogg. “Thinks he’s God’s gift to the universe and thinks he’s untouchable.”
None of the students I spoke with had any idea what had become of him since they’d left the U.K. When I tracked him down, he was eager to talk. And he had a lot to say about Warnborough College and the students who went there.
Brenden Tempest-Mogg grew up in a suburb of Sydney, Australia. His mother wanted him to study medicine, but career counselors told him he was better suited for sales, advertising, and marketing.
In 1969, the young Tempest-Mogg took a big trip abroad, sailing on an ocean liner from Australia to the United Kingdom. “It was a graduation present from my parents, and I’d always wanted to go to England,” he told me. “I thought, Well, perhaps I could stay on a bit longer if I could find a place at a British university.”
Tempest-Mogg got admitted as a graduate student to Hertford College—a legitimate University of Oxford college, with a history dating back to the 13th century. He enjoyed all that Oxford the city and Oxford University had to offer. But he also dreamed of crossing the Atlantic, to have “the excitement, the razzmatazz” of an “American experience.”
He spent a year in the United States, teaching at a college in West Virginia. In 1973, he brought some of his students to study in the U.K. Tempest-Mogg’s mother had bought a big Victorian house in North Oxford, and he used it as a school and dormitory. This was the beginning of Warnborough College.
Warnborough relocated to Boars Hill in 1976. With promotional materials deeming it “the American college in Oxford,” the school offered semester-abroad programs to students from the U.S., Asia, and the Middle East.
Up until the mid-1980s, Warnborough didn’t cause any major controversies. That changed after the college made a bunch of empty promises about postgraduate programs. In 1987, BBC Radio broadcast a 25-minute exposé on Warnborough, calling it “a nightmare of inadequate teaching, poor living conditions and facilities, high costs, [and] low academic standards.” The report also revealed that “Warnborough has no official authority to offer degrees.”
When the BBC tried to interview Tempest-Mogg in 1987, he said he was calling the police. When I asked him about that BBC report, he told me: “There’s a small group of people that set themselves up as experts on all of these new ideas and new institutions and so on. And I think that those people have been active in trying to get bad press wherever we show success.”
Warnborough didn’t show all that much success, by Tempest-Mogg’s own admission. In 1990, he wrote a case study on the college. It said that Warnborough’s enrollment had “declined drastically” after the BBC’s report; that the college had taken out a high-interest $2 million loan to solve an “immediate financial crisis”; and that the only way to pay off that loan was to recruit more students.
Going into 1995, Warnborough struck upon a possible solution. For the first time in its history, the college would admit graduating high school students. Warnborough began marketing a full four-year program to American teenagers. “It would be a new challenge, and we thought, Well, it didn’t really matter where they came from, at what level. Let’s give it a try,” Tempest-Mogg said.
I told Tempest-Mogg that the students I’d spoken to said that Warnborough’s marketing was deceptive—that it had implied that Warnborough was a part of Oxford University. He laughed, telling me that was “foolish.” If the school had used deceptive marketing, he said, then “people would arrive, and we’d have, like, huge problems. But it was only just this handful of students.”
In reality, it was more than just a handful of students. In a civil lawsuit, 35 families said that a Warnborough representative had implied or stated outright that the college “was a part of or affiliated with Oxford University.”
In that court case, Tempest-Mogg said that if there were any misrepresentations, they weren’t his fault. He blamed Warnborough’s director of U.S. admissions, Mark Huck—the man who’d drafted the college’s brochures.
Huck blamed Tempest-Mogg right back. He said that Warnborough’s president had approved those brochures. And Huck denied ever suggesting that Warnborough was a part of Oxford.
One thing we do know is that it was Tempest-Mogg who came up with the concept for that promotional CD—the audio brochure called “Inspiring the Vision.”
“The vision really was to provide an excellent learning experience to all those who wanted to learn more about studying in a different culture, in a different environment, and with a different system,” he said.
At this point, I read him some of the narration from the CD, starting with the very first sentence: “A great deal can happen in a thousand years, and Oxford University has seen it all.” Did he understand why the students might have found that confusing, given that Warnborough was not a part of Oxford University?
Tempest-Mogg did not budge. He told it me was “like somebody going to study in Paris saying, Well, Paris is a wonderful city. It has great museums and art galleries and so on. If you want to experience Paris and get credits for a study program, then join blah-blah-blah institution.”
When I pointed out that the voice-over specifies Oxford University, not Oxford the city, he remained unmoved.
“Most of the city is dominated by the university because in Oxford itself—I don’t know if you’ve been there, but if you visit the city, the first thing Americans say is, ‘Where’s the university?’ So the city, in a sense, is the university, and the university is the city.”
Looking back on all this decades later, if it was all a scam, it wasn’t a very good one. You can create the impression that your school is a part of Oxford University, but the students who come there will see for themselves that it isn’t, and they’ll tell people about it.
A U.S. federal judge ruled in 1996 that Warnborough’s promotional materials were “misleading and could easily cause any observer to believe that Warnborough College is a part of Oxford University.” He banned the school from the federal student loan program.
Another judge, this one in Washington state, ordered Warnborough to pay $292,000 in restitution—all of the money it had received from three dozen Americans.
Jessica Custer had made Brenden Tempest-Mogg promise her that she’d get a refund. The court said she was owed $13,130. She told me she “got nothing. Zero dollars and zero cents.”
Jen Mills didn’t get any money back from Warnborough either. When she returned home from England, she reapplied to the University of Washington. She got in, but this time without the scholarships she’d been offered coming out of high school.
“I had worked so hard through high school to enable opportunities that were not going to put an additional burden on my family but that were going to give me an academic leg up and a leg up moving on into life,” she said. “That had just kind of dissipated into thin air.”
Mills ultimately emerged from the saga with an education and a career in finance. But she told me that the debt that she piled up to go to Warnborough took a toll on her family. “My two brothers who were closest to me and next in line kind of didn’t get the opportunity to go to college,” she said. “And I think that situation—it wasn’t all of the story, but that situation did have an impact on their future progression.”
Schuler spent his entire savings to get to Oxford—all of the money that he’d earned working at a fast-food place. He also didn’t get his money back from Warnborough. When he came home, he started back from zero, finding work at a restaurant and taking an overnight shift at a factory. He ultimately graduated from Johns Hopkins University. He’s now the CEO of a technology company. And sometimes, he tells people “about the time I went to Fake Oxford.”
“I could have gone with the safe thing that I knew,” he said. “I could have only gone to schools that I’d visited first. I took a risk, and that one didn’t work out. Or maybe it did. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, maybe there are things I got out of that that were super important for the path that I would take.”
Custer was the first person in her family to go to college. She was known as the smart kid. The one who’d always done everything right. But after Fake Oxford, it all felt different. “You see that horrified, pitying kind of look on people’s faces,” she said. “It was extremely upsetting and disheartening because you kind of have this life plan set up. And now this plan that you had is gone.”
The schools that had once promised her scholarships had given that money away to other students. She ended up enrolling at Allegheny College and later transferred to Duquesne University. She now works for an agency that serves people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“I like what I do, but there are things that I may have done instead if I didn’t have the amount of debt that I did and I had a little bit of wiggle room and leeway,” she said.
Warnborough went into liquidation a year after Custer, Mills, and Schuler left Boars Hill. But Tempest-Mogg resurrected Warnborough shortly thereafter. It still exists today, headquartered more than 100 miles outside Oxford, in Canterbury, England.
A school official told me that as of 2021, Warnborough had 750 students worldwide taking both online and on-site courses. That official also complained about Warnborough’s Wikipedia page. He said it’s maintained by a “secret cabal of editors” who are out to persecute Warnborough.
During our interview, I asked Tempest-Mogg if there was anything he would’ve done differently about 1995. He told me that in retrospect, “I think perhaps we should have kept to the model of just taking junior-year-abroad students who were more mature, more open to new challenges, and were perhaps more visionary in what they wanted to achieve for themselves.”
I also asked him what he would say to the students who felt as if they were duped in 1995.
“I think two words: Move on,” he said. “We’ve all had bad experiences and setbacks, and it’s not sunny every day, and we just have to accept the bad with the good, move on, and put it down as a learning experience. And perhaps if they’ve had children, they’ve been able to give them some extra wisdom from their own experience.”
“Wow, that’s harsh,” Jen Mills told me, laughing, when I played her that sound bite.
“It is annoying that he has not gotten any perspective on this at all,” Ian Schuler said. “I’m able to have some perspective on the thing. I was able to learn from that, and it feels like he should have to as well.”
“I mean, if I was being really rude and candid,” Jessica Custer said, “I would probably say something to him like You know, karma’s a bitch, and at some point, I hope you get yours. But that’s not very adult.”