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Twenty-one people have been arrested after US authorities set up a fake university to expose immigration fraud. Officials said the accused knew that the University of Northern New Jersey did not exist, but they were unaware it was a ruse run by immigration agents. The defendants acted as brokers for more than 1,000 foreigners who sought to maintain student and work visas, prosecutors said. Most foreign nationals involved in the scheme came from China and India.

In an ongoing investigation into a cash-for-admissions racket, the enrolments of 1,080 students in a pre-medical course in Madhya Pradesh state in central India between 2009 and 2013 have been cancelled. The scam, initially exposed in 2013, and two recent high-profile deaths linked to it have sent shock waves across the country. Millions of rupees are believed to have changed hands in what some have described as India’s biggest-ever rigging case.

A medical school admission examinations scandal in India has turned into a veritable whodunit with thousands of arrests, mysterious deaths and the suspected involvement of top politicians and bureaucrats.

Welcome to Patna, a city that in its own strange way has married the free market to the classroom. The arrests of several peoples for leaking the question papers for the Common Admission Test for entry to the Indian Institutes of Management are only the tip of the iceberg.

In a decision intended to curb the widespread sale of seats in professional colleges, India's Supreme Court has ordered that private institutions may no longer demand the "donation" of extra, upfront fees from new students. Medical and engineering colleges now demand upfront payments of tens of thousands of dollars, from students whose test scores do not qualify them for places.

In 1998, the education watchdog group from Bombay, the Forum for Fairness in Education, won a landmark case that clamped down on secretive admissions practices. The court ruled that all colleges and universities must make entrance-examination scores public, to ensure that admissions are based on merit, and not money passed under the table.