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Elite universities in the United States and the United Kingdom have been investing endowment funds offshore in order to pay little or no tax, according to details revealed in the so-called Paradise Papers. According to the student run Fossil Free Pitt Coalition “We are concerned about the lack of transparency, as two-thirds of the endowment is just a mystery to us. We are suspicious about where that huge segment of the endowment is going.” An emeritus professor in accounting at the University of Essex, told the newspaper that UK universities should be more transparent about their investment decisions, since they are public institutions that receive public money, including from the European Union.

Universities in the United States should close down their Confucius Institutes – teaching and research centres funded directly by the Chinese government – says a report by the National Association of Scholars or NAS. The wide-ranging report includes additional insights on the institutes’ often-secretive operations gleaned from the contracts signed with a dozen US universities, obtained through freedom of information law requests. The report, Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and soft power in American higher education, says unless contracts between US universities and the Hanban can be renegotiated to include more transparency, financial and hiring autonomy for US host universities, academic freedom guarantees and other safeguards, the institutes should be shut down.

A major Chinese education company has paid thousands of dollars in perks or cash to admissions officers at top U.S. universities to help students apply to American schools. According to eight former employees the company’s services didn’t end there. Employees engaged in practices such as writing application essays for students, altering recommendation letters and modifying grades on high school transcripts. The company’s success in gaining access to leading American colleges underscores how people on both sides of the Pacific are hungry to capitalize on Chinese students’ desire to study in the United States.

In 2013, New York’s attorney general, sued the ‘Trump University’ for-profit company, asserting it had intentionally misled over 5,000 students into paying up to $35,000 for seminars and mentorship programs. The fraud lawsuit resurfaced this week, when a state appeals court unanimously denied a bid by the university’s owner to throw out the litigation. Two former Trump University students have also filed two separate class-action civil lawsuits in California.

A doctoral student in higher education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, conducted a sociological research about corruption in higher education. Based on his examination of the 2009 Illinois admissions scandal, which centered on the university’s use of a separate, hidden admissions process to ease the entry of applicants with ties to politicians, donors, and university officials, his paper concludes that administrative misconduct frequently is "an organizational problem that demands organizational solutions."

An unusually high number of students at Stanford University are suspected of cheating during the most recent term, putting faculty members and administrators of the prestigious institution on alert. University spokeswoman says that in the 2013-2014 academic year, 83 students violated the honor code. In the most recent term, the newspaper reported that one instructor believes that 20 percent of students in a large introductory course may have cheated.

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.

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.