It's pretty obvious that the old guy is a scammer. After all that's what cult leaders generally are, and his use of magic tricks just further shows this. As for how he obtained that info, if he didn't know about it beforehand he could have just bought it from the admins.
By context they are in the second year. He mentioned that it would take around 1.5 years to graduate and that was around August. So if this is 5.5 years after that they should be recent college graduates given a 4 year course.