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The National Audit Office (NAO) has revealed concerns about organized crime exploiting lax oversight in England's unregulated colleges, potentially profiting from student loan fraud amounting to £60 million. The report highlights instances of fraud and abuse at private higher education providers offering courses in collaboration with mainstream universities. Some providers allegedly enroll students with little interest in completing courses to access government-backed maintenance loans, leading to substantial financial gains through tuition fees and franchising fees.

The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education (MoPSE) has established strategic command centers across the nation to address various issues plaguing schools. These include actions like dismissing students over unpaid fees, offering paid extra lessons, discriminatory enrollment practices, corporal punishment, imposing unapproved fees, and other misconduct. The MoPSE's communications and advocacy director urged stakeholders to utilize designated contacts to report any malpractices. The goal is to ensure that every school-going child receives a quality, fair, and comprehensive primary, and secondary education.

South Korea’s Ministry of Education is planning to strengthen measures related to school bullying records and their consideration during university admission applications after the appointment of a new national investigation chief was cancelled following revelations that he was involved in a lawsuit against his son’s forced school transfer for bullying.

Three Georgia women and an Alabama man pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the US Department of Education’s Federal financial aid programs worth millions of dollars. According to the Justice Department, they admitted enrolling people who were not eligible to attend college and completing financial aid applications using fake students’ names; they also did fake students’ homework and exams and manipulated grade requirements to continue qualifying for Federal financial aid.

The Indonesian Anti-Corruption Commission (KPK) has arrested the Rector of the University of Lampung for allegedly receiving IDR5 billion (US$336,000) in bribes from the families of students who failed the university entrance exams known as the autonomous admissions scheme. According to KPK, the ‘autonomous channel’ exam conducted by universities is vulnerable to bribery due to a lack of transparency and specific guidelines from the Ministry of Education, leaving state universities unsupervised.

The Anti-Corruption Commission has charged five members and an executive director of the North South University (NSU) board of governors with abuse of power, increasing their allowances to ten times the approved rate, and buying luxury cars at the expense of students. For more than a decade, NSU has offered several Bachelor of Business Administration programmes without University Grants Commission approval. According to an investigator, NSU was allowed to enrol 50 students in approved BBA programmes, but it enrolled about 2,700 students in one semester.

The Director of the Future Gate Agency was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined 7 million dinars (about $50,000) after 75 Algerian students who wanted to enrol in foreign universities, including in Ukraine, Turkey, and Russia, fell victim to fraud. Although they paid the Agency large sums of money, the accommodation conditions were wretched, and their university applications forged. Two of their assistants and three influencers, prosecuted in the same case, were given one year in prison and fined 100,000 dinars (about $700) each.

Chung Chou University of Science and Technology (CCUT) has been forcing students from Uganda to work in factories for long hours to pay off debts they incurred since they did not receive the promised scholarships. The university had been under observation for quality issues since 2015 so this new element persuaded the advisory commission on private schools to ask the Ministry of Education for tougher sanctions against CCUT which is no longer allowed to recruit any new students, whether foreign or domestic.

Nigeria’s National Universities Commission (NUC) had discovered fake institutions in Benin awarding PhD degrees after students completed bogus studies in less than one year. According to NUC, academic projects and theses were sold for about NGN3,000 (about US$7.32) per copy, and sexual harassment was prevalent. Many of these fraudulent institutions are run by Nigerian proprietors who target students from Nigeria, where public universities struggle to accommodate a high number of qualified students seeking admission.