Five universities in the United States agreed to settle a lawsuit accusing them of colluding on financial aid and admissions violations, according to new court filings. Yale, Columbia, Duke, Brown and Emory universities will pay a combined US$104.5 million to settle their portions of the case, which was brought by five former students against more than a dozen schools. The suit alleges the universities violated antitrust law when they ignored their pledge to not weigh a student’s ability to pay tuition fees when considering whether or not to accept, a practice referred to as ‘need-blind’ admission.

There are 27 suspected cases of irregularities in the school administration of the Ministry of Education. These irregularities include fake school packages and diplomas, amounting to a total of two million dollars.

Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees. The investigative team had been created in 2016 after the collapse of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, which set off a wave of complaints from students about predatory activities at for-profit schools. The institutions had been accused of widespread fraud that involved misrepresenting enrolment benefits, job placement rates and program offerings, which could leave students with huge debts and no degrees.

More than 160 students — nearly 30 percent of the student body — at D.C.’s celebrated Duke Ellington School of the Arts live outside the city and are not paying the tuition required of suburbanites who attend the District’s public schools, an internal investigation has found. The findings, which city officials announced Friday, come amid intensifying distrust of the District’s public schools, stoked by scandals involving inflated graduation rates and a former chancellor skirting enrolment rules for his daughter.

The president and CEO of a private college that catered to foreign students has been sentenced to 16 years in prison for defrauding the Department of Homeland Security by issuing phony visa-related documents to international students in exchange for tuition and fee.