Rajiv Gupta, CredForce and Edvantic ordered to pay $1.2 million to Wharton School

Last week a court in Philadelphia ordered Rajiv Gupta, Sanjeeva Shukla, Credforce America and Edvantic to pay $1.2 million to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and to stop using the school’s logos and images for sales purposes.

CreditForce labels itself as the world’s “largest credentialing powerhouse.” It partners with universities, professional groups and other institutions to provide fee-based programs where participants can earn certificates, diplomas, fellowships and other rewards, ostensibly to advance their careers.

Credforce Asia, which has its head office in Gurgaon, India is the parent company of Credforce America, based in Austin, Texas. It also has offices in London, Singapore and Cape Town.

Launched in 2018, Edvantic offers executive education programs “in collaboration with leading global institutions.” Rajiv Gupta is chief executive of both Credforce and Edvantic.  

In lawsuits filed in October 2020 and March this year, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) alleged that Rajiv Gupta and the other defendants had failed to pay Wharton, its Business School, more than $1.2 million in fees collected from students since 2018. Penn also charged that Rajiv Gupta and the others were fraudulently using Wharton’s intellectual property and logos in 2020 without an agreement.

In 2018 and 2019, Wharton had partnered with CredForce for a two-week, on-campus executive education program taught by the school’s faculty. The participants, whose companies reportedly paid over $20,000 in fees for the program, were awarded the title Wharton Fellows in Talent Management.

CredForce regrets that “a century-old brand like Wharton (is) so desperate that it starts a campaign of lies and falsehoods against a dynamic, growing company,” Sanjeeva Shukla, the company’s chief product officer, emailed The Wall Street Journal, while also denying Penn’s allegations before the court announced its decision last week.

CredForce says it connects the “supply chain of knowledge, expertise, material and support services... (to provide) support to certification bodies and accrediting organizations in ways that make their operations more reliable, transparent and scalable.” It has a partnership with Edvantic which, the company states, makes “competence validation and professional certification easy yet robust, reliable and agile.”

The two companies, run by Gupta, together provide services “for the global certification and credentialing industry…to smoothly run and manage marketing, operational and commercial functions.”

Edvantic says if offers more than 50 products and programs, including in data science, artificial intelligence, talent management, business strategy and finance. Partnering with over 200 institutions in 90 countries, including global corporations and governments, the company says it has trained more than 250,000 individuals.

Clients who recommend Edvantic’s services on its site include Gasheja Faustin, Principal, College of Business and Economics, University of Rwanda and Jonah Soe Kotae, vice president, Internet Society, Association of Liberian Human Relations Professionals.  

Rajiv Gupta, CEO of CredForce and Edvantic, held senior roles in human resources at Imparto Software, Moser Baer and Systems America; and was CEO of BCI, a business process outsourcing standards company.

Since 2008, he has served as a member of the Bloomberg Market Advisory Board. In 2000, he was named the Best Organizational Psychologist of the Year by the Psycho-Linguistic Association of India.

Based in Austin, Texas, Gupta earned an MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. His profile on Edvantic states that he is a Fellow of the Wharton School, which apparently means that he took master classes for senior executives at Wharton.

Short term executive education programs, which range from a weekend to twelve weeks, are the major source of revenues for business schools. Typically, companies pay the high fees for these programs to reward an employee for their service.    

Wharton reportedly emailed executives enrolled in a 2020 program that, while it couldn’t refund the fees they paid to CredForce, the school would offer a free makeup program after the Covid-19 restrictions end.

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