A federal grand jury in Kansas indicted a former college-basketball coach last month on charges that he arranged for his players to receive phony academic credit and stole $120,000 in Pell Grants. The former coach faces a total of 51 years in prison and over $1.5-million in fines if found guilty of all counts.

Plans by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) to export its examinations system to China have been put on hold following charges of fraud by students looking to gain entry to Britain on study visas. Staff at a Sino-British college, Sea Rich, raised concerns that many students were not studying, but had been promised by the university a two-year-year HND for payments of US$2,200. The students had also been promised assistance by the university to get UK entry clearance.

In spring 2004 interviews were conducted with 43 rectors, vice rectors, and administrators at five private universities. A consensus emerged that successful licensing or accreditation applications, with few exceptions, required some form of bribery. Licensing might require a bribe of US$ 200 about two months' salary for a typical academic - while accreditation might call for a 10 or 20 times greater "gratuity."

Ukrainian university students can earn a passing grade two ways: by slogging through the books or by paying a $20 bribe. Yushchenko has decided to change this situation but the task won't be easy.

The legal advisor to the Eduardo Mondlane University has denied that there was anything improper in giving scholarships to people who do not work at the university. In 2003 alone, over 147,000 US dollars, money that should have been used to send teachers to take further degrees abroad, in order to build up the institutional capacity of the university, were allegedly spent instead on the Vice-Chancellor's daughter, two children of the head of the universities public relations and 16 others.

Fifteen of the 80 students enrolled with the Namibia College of Open Learning will not write their end of year exams after a teacher allegedly misappropriated their examination fees. It is suspected he used the money to settle personal accounts. The students will not be able to sit their exams this year as the fraud was discovered too late.

The president of New Zealand's largest postsecondary institution defended it last month against politicians who have accused it of widespread corruption. It is also suggested that the university is home to nepotism and fraudulent accounting.

According to investigations conducted in Nicaragua, among the 3 500 teachers from autonomous colleges who actually collect a salary on a monthly basis, in reality only 1 945 of them are actually teaching. At least 555 individual salaries are therefore paid to fictitious teachers or to individuals falsely (fraudulently) using the names of teachers.

Almost a third of the polled students in Serbia said that they would bribe somebody if that was the only way to pass an exam, according to a survey conducted by the Students Union of Serbia. 69 % would cheat in their exams if it was certain they would not be caught, while 53 percent said they would not feel bad about the cheating. Seven in ten students said that corruption is involved in enrolment procedures, and 79% heard of cheating in the exams.

The Ministry of National Education of Indonesia proposed a bill to further deregulate the Nation's universities. But the privatization of leading universities will lead, according to the Indonesia Corruption Watch, to the exclusion of the children from less well-off families. The high costs of university entrance and passage in the way have indeed tended to either reduce or eliminate students from the poorer provinces of Indonesia. Major corruption cases break out in Indonesia on a regular basis and there is strong evidence that higher university tuition fees increased corruption in the sector.