News

Keeping the promises of cross-border higher education by fighting corruption risks

Cover Page - IAU Horizons - May 2017

With cross-border education more than tripling in the last thirty years, the diverse range of opportunities to study abroad (e.g. e-higher education, campuses abroad, franchised courses, etc.) are on the rise, and with them opportunities for corruption.

In the latest issue of IUS magazine ‘IUA Horizon’ focusing on corruption in higher education, Jacques Hallak and Muriel Poisson discuss the risks of a growing cross-border higher education market and highlight some promising approaches currently implemented across the globe to combat such risks.

Risks include falsified applications, lowering of admission, performance, or graduation standards for overseas students in return for financial gain, and corrupt officers issuing licenses and franchise rights in return for bribes.

Traditional national quality assurance practices are not always adapted to combat these issues, and new approaches are necessary to keep the promise of quality cross-border education.

Promising measures include, amongst others, codes of ethics for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), public access to information to ensure the transparency of admission and grading processes or audits that help check that HEIs comply with social and ethical norms.

Read the full article here

Other articles available in this special issueare:

  • IAU-MCO Guidelines for an Institutional Code of Ethics in Higher Education, Abridged and annotated version of the Guidelines adopted in 2012, by Eva Egron-Polak
  • Corruption in Higher Education: an Overview, by Goolam Mohamedbhai, Mauritius
  • Ethics, Transparency and Integrity in Education: a Council of Europe project, by Sjur Bergan, Council of Europe
  • Higher Education Should Help to Provide “Ethical Competence”, by Bo Rothstein, UK and Lennart Levi, Sweden
  • Fighting Corruption in Tertiary Education through Good Governance, by Jamil Salmi, Expert and Robin Matross Helms, American Council on Education
  • Fighting against Academic Corruption in China: the War Must Go on, by Kai Ren, People’s Republic of China