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A 23-year-old man, residing a stone's throw from Lyon, was arrested on Tuesday morning, 3 October, for trying to fool the higher education scholarship system. During the 2016-2017 school year, the young man had received government money based on the establishment he claimed to be attending the conditions he had declared. The problem was that the student had falsified his university registration document, and Crous, which manages student grants, came to realize it.

The Department of Education is planning to introduce laws to prosecute “essay mill” companies who offer to write students’ assignments in exchange for money. The move is a response to mounting concern over the practice which allows students to circumvent their college’s plagiarism detection systems. The use of these services is not easily detected as software used by universities only detects where students have copied from previously published academic texts. He said the new guidelines would be developed in consultation with providers, students and other relevant parties, and would be informed by recent UK research and experience.

The head of an exam board is warning that undetected qualifications fraud in the security industry is becoming a "risk to public safety". When it applies to security staff, he says, such fraud is a "significant threat to public safety and wellbeing". Regulation is more focused on trying to prevent academic malpractice, but it is not adequately equipped to take on systematic, deliberate fraud. He is calling for an expert panel to be set up to try to establish the extent of qualifications fraud, particularly in areas of security and public risk.

New higher education legislation being put before Parliament could put students and the reputations of UK universities at risk, even encouraging “scam” universities, independent experts have warned. An extensive report released by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) suggests nearly three quarters of new higher education providers opening in the next two years will remain unregulated after the Government’s controversial new Higher Education and Research Bill comes into effect.

A German finance expert has warned that the country’s federal states could be entering a “dangerous race to the bottom” regarding legislation on transparency in cooperation between industry and higher education. He believes that cooperation agreements should be publicly accessible in order to guarantee academic freedom. The professor of finance and political economy at Aalen University, contested a contract between the University of Mainz and the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation, the country’s largest pharmaceutical company that also engages in research.

Britain’s universities are said to be in the midst of a “plagiarism epidemic” after an investigation by The Times newspaper revealed how almost 50,000 students were caught cheating in the last three years. The newspaper also found international students - from outside the European Union - to be the worst offenders, coming out as being more than four times as likely to cheat in exams and coursework, according to data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Ukraine has little to offer international students. The quality of education offered is low, there is endless red tape and corruption is rife. Over the past quarter century, the quality of education offered has dropped dramatically due not only to a lack of state funding and a consequent brain drain, but primarily to rampant endemic corruption. Failed structural reforms and institutional incapacity in higher education have left Ukrainian youth without any hope of receiving world-class education and have had a negative impact on international students as well.