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.

The NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) says that universities in NSW should consider a range of key initiatives including separating the academic compliance and incentive functions of their international student offices to reduce the risk of corruption.

Plagiarism at the higher education level has been an open secret, with many suspected plagiarists holding senior faculty positions in different universities across the country. But in a comical turn, the Higher Education Commission recently gave its best research paper award to a scholar who had been blacklisted by the regulatory body in 2008 for publishing a plagiarized paper.

Abuja — The Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) has targeted Nigerian Universities as part of preventive measures in the long term strategy of the anti-corruption fight. The commission plans to engage management and staff of tertiary institutions to work to imbibe a culture of transparency and accountability in the overall interest of the country.

The Cambodian government's Anti-Corruption Unit has been called on to police next month's national school-leaving exam in a bid to stamp out systemic cheating that has for decades compromised the quality of high school students applying for university places.

Russia's state education watchdog has added four universities to a list of educational institutions that will be prohibited from enrolling new students from this autumn, the agency said in a statement last week. The addition of two universities in Moscow and two in Dagestan bring the list of educational institutions blacklisted in recent days to 12.

Some of China's top universities are coming under scrutiny as part of the country's anti-corruption drive, with Shanghai's prestigious Fudan University last week named and shamed by anti-graft watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection.

The financial crisis at UVSQ (University of Versailles Saint-Quentin), on the edge of default in payment in late 2013, is "essentially the result of the institution's failure to anticipate the consequences of management decisions".