In the media

Today’s higher education legal landscape in the USA is characterised by a wave of issues, including inflated employment rates for recent graduates, inflated starting salaries, as is the case with law schools and business schools, and the employment formula linked to federal grants and loans recipients, as is the case with for-profits. This wave will bring more lawsuits.

A major Chinese education company has paid thousands of dollars in perks or cash to admissions officers at top U.S. universities to help students apply to American schools. According to eight former employees the company’s services didn’t end there. Employees engaged in practices such as writing application essays for students, altering recommendation letters and modifying grades on high school transcripts. The company’s success in gaining access to leading American colleges underscores how people on both sides of the Pacific are hungry to capitalize on Chinese students’ desire to study in the United States.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from more than a dozen large US public universities found that in the 2014-15 school year, the schools recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students. They recorded one such report per 100 domestic students. Faculty and domestic students interviewed said it appears that substantial numbers of international students either don’t comprehend or don’t accept US standards of academic integrity.

In 2013, New York’s attorney general, sued the ‘Trump University’ for-profit company, asserting it had intentionally misled over 5,000 students into paying up to $35,000 for seminars and mentorship programs. The fraud lawsuit resurfaced this week, when a state appeals court unanimously denied a bid by the university’s owner to throw out the litigation. Two former Trump University students have also filed two separate class-action civil lawsuits in California.

The University of Iowa suspects at least 30 Chinese students of having used ringers to take their exams. The case offers a look inside a thriving underground economy of cheating services aimed at the hundreds of thousands of Chinese kids applying to and attending foreign colleges. Coaching services author essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about a $1,000 a course.

A United Kingdom-based professor in education has declared that the promotion of teachers to the rank of principal in Jamaica is a flawed, corrupt enterprise prejudiced towards the 'favoured'. The Professor, reader in education at Brunel University in the United Kingdom, has contended that the progression of teachers in Jamaica to school leadership is characterised by systemic corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security arrested 21 people Tuesday on charges that they had recruited thousands of students through the promise of fraudulently obtained visas. At the center of the arrests was the University of Northern New Jersey, the brainchild of federal agents who masqueraded as representatives of a for-profit university to ensnare the recruiters.

Twenty-one people have been arrested after US authorities set up a fake university to expose immigration fraud. Officials said the accused knew that the University of Northern New Jersey did not exist, but they were unaware it was a ruse run by immigration agents. The defendants acted as brokers for more than 1,000 foreigners who sought to maintain student and work visas, prosecutors said. Most foreign nationals involved in the scheme came from China and India.

In October 2015, a New York district court ruled in favor of the academic publisher Elsevier, which had accused Sci-Hub, a website that offers pirated versions of academic papers, of copyright violation. That decision allowed authorities to take down the site’s domain name, sci-hub.org. Suspending a domain name does not delete a website forever, though, it just prevents visitors from knowing where exactly to find it. It’s trivial enough to relaunch the same site under another domain, as Sci-Hub did.

The Obama administration is highlighting growing concern over soaring United States student debt by forming a new enforcement unit to crack down on illegal behaviour by higher education institutions. The Department of Education said that it would create the unit, having taken action recently against several colleges for profiting illegally from students with deceptive marketing and inappropriate federal loans.