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During the annual conference of the European Association for International Education, an expert stated that fraud in international higher education is a $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion business. He claimed that fraud is a pervasive problem and defined it broadly, situating various forms of it on a spectrum of severity – from resume embellishment, on the low end, to full-scale identity fraud on the high end.

An associate dean of academic services spends a lot of time studying, lamenting and worrying about cheating in universities, but a Montreal-based online service that propels the activity to a new level made even her wince. The website unemployedprofessors.com has teachers writing papers for students. "So you can play while we make your papers go away" is its tag line.

Controversy over plagiarism in the PhD thesis of the director of Thailand's National Innovation Agency, or NIA, has highlighted concerns over academic integrity and a widespread culture of plagiarism. Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University revoked the PhD – for the first time in the institution's history.

New laws to clamp down on academic cheating at China's universities may be implemented as the rampant problems of plagiarism, falsification, lying about credentials and research papers, and other misconduct continue unabated in higher education. However, some experts have said that government-led anti-corruption campaigns are common at times of public dissatisfaction against the authorities, so as to appease the public.

More than 600 degree programmes in 60 universities in Iran are now segregated by gender, in what is being seen as a major expansion of the government's efforts to separate male and female students. Iranian rights groups released the report of a study by Student News, which found that there has not only been an increase in gender separation but also in gender discrimination.

Today there are 39 higher education institutions and 250,000 students in Slovakia, which has a population of 5.4 million. In 2008 only two higher education institutions were using plagiarism detection systems. The situation was serious and required a solution. The Ministry of Education decided to launch a systematic fight against plagiarism. A goal was set: by 2010 it would be obligatory for all Slovak institutions to use the national central repository for theses and dissertations (NCRTD) and the national plagiarism detection system (NPDS).

Striking a blow at a Silicon Valley school that attracted foreigners with student visas, federal agents raided Sunnyvale's Herguan University and charged its CEO with visa fraud. The charges come a year after an investigation found Herguan was among a group of Bay Area schools that misrepresented information on federal applications, which allowed them to sponsor overseas students for coveted visas.

The Acting Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) has focused the commission's attention on purging the Nigerian university system of the menace of corruption with the cooperation and collaboration of the National Universities Commission (NUC). This will entail a comprehensive system study and review of the country's institutions.

The federal government wants to toughen the rules surrounding student visas in the hopes of cracking down on fraud and human smuggling — even though it's not clear just how big a problem this is. There is a proposal to weed out international students who arrive on a student visa as a means of gaining access to Canada's labour market and don't actually enrol in school. There are also concerns that some are ending up at sub-par institutions that ultimately hurt Canada's credibility on the international stage.

Turkey has suspended its recognition of Bulgarian university diplomas. The Turkish University Education Council made this decision on the grounds of high levels of academic forgery, fraud and exam cheating in Bulgaria. Bulgaria's Education Minister has admonished the Bulgarian media for provoking an international scandal, claiming that the problematic diplomas were forged by Turkish citizens.