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.

Padding college applications is virtually as old as higher education itself. But many undergraduate and graduate officials say that in recent years there's been a spike in problematic submissions, especially from emerging markets, where the families of the elite and the growing middle..

The Department of Education has fined Yale University $165,000 for "very serious and numerous" Clery Act violations, stemming from sex offenses that the Ivy League school failed to report, as well as not properly defining areas where crime statistics could be tabulated. The university has come under increased scrutiny in recent years for the manner in which it deals with sexual offenses that occur on its campus.

Thirty-five former school officials have been implicated in a test cheating scandal, and have been given a deadline to surrender to authorities in the state of Georgia. The accused in the city of Atlanta face counts of racketeering, making false statements and conspiring to improve test scores to win cash bonuses.

A cheating scandal at Harvard College has grown, and this time, the administrators, not students, are under fire. The school has apologized for the way it handled a secret search of the email accounts of resident deans. It conducted the search in an attempt to find who leaked information about the scandal to the media last year.

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 State Board of Higher Education is working to tighten admission policies for international students after an audit found some Chinese student transcripts submitted to Dickinson State University were fakes.

Claremont McKenna College, a small, prestigious California school, stated that for the past six years, it has submitted false SAT scores to publications like US News & World Report that use the data in widely followed college rankings.