Search Page

The Education department must explain why it let a student loan company that an audit had found improper millions of dollars. The loan company received the payments through a subsidy program that guaranteed a 9.5 percent interest rate on student loans. In an accord reached in January, the department allowed it to keep the $278 million it had received but suspended future payments of more than $800 million until a future audit could determine whether the company was eligible for the money.

Zambia's government has decided to scrap its national bursary scheme and replace it with a transparent student loans scheme, following controversies including allegations of corruption that have dogged the bursary initiative for years.

A forensic probe into corrupt practices at the government’s embattled multibillion-rand student funding vehicle is set to be launched, said Higher Education and Training Minister. The scheme gets a significant portion of the department’s budget. Students who did not meet the scheme’s funding thresholds were granted loans, putting countless deserving others at a disadvantage.

A NSW government minister has launched a blistering attack on the federal government's administration of the scandal-ridden private vocational education sector. The sector has been plagued by allegations of dodgy private providers recruiting tens of thousands of students through free laptops and targeting illiterate, disabled students to sign them up to tens of thousands of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded student debt through the federal government's HECS-style VET-FEE help program.

Accreditors keep hundreds of schools with low graduation rates or high loan defaults alive. Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults.

Uganda joins the rest of Africa to mark the Africa Public Service Day, an annual event that recognizes value and virtue of service to the community. The objective is to raise the image of public service, thus enhance trust in government, collect, document and share best practices for possible replication within a country as well as across the African Continent.

The US government administration is creating a new office at the U.S. Department of Education dedicated to investigating and punishing illegal activity at colleges and providing debt relief to defrauded federal loan borrowers. Officials on Monday announced a new “enforcement unit” that will be charged with investigating misconduct at colleges, imposing administrative actions against colleges and resolving student loan debt relief claims linked to fraud. The administrative reshuffling will speed up and improve the quality of the department’s investigations of wrongdoing.

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.