The director of the Training Domain, an educational institution in Fort Meyers designed to improve students ‘employability skills, has been charged with 10 counts of wire fraud and one count of Federal Student Assistance (FSA) fraud. From July 2017 to April 2019, she assisted students in applying for financial aid but instead of using the loan and grant proceeds to hold classes and for other educational expenses, the director kept the FSA fund and split them with students. She also created false and fraudulent high school diplomas.

Immediately after the President was elected, borrower advocates and lawmakers expressed concern about what would happen to the current regulations aimed at holding for-profit colleges accountable. On Tuesday, their concerns were validated. The Education Department announced that it would delay and renegotiate two of the previous administration’s signature regulations: the first aims to penalize programs whose graduates’ loan payments exceed a set percentage of their earnings, while the second simplifies the process for borrowers who say they have been defrauded by their colleges.

Stakeholders are still awaiting a response from the education cabinet secretary to a World Bank report released earlier this year which put Kenya’s Higher Education Loans Board on the spot for mismanaging its funds at the expense of needy students. The report, indicates that the Higher Education Loans Board is spending excessive money on administrative costs that could be added to students’ loans. It recommends an overhaul of the loan disbursement and recovery mechanisms.

Today’s higher education legal landscape in the USA is characterised by a wave of issues, including inflated employment rates for recent graduates, inflated starting salaries, as is the case with law schools and business schools, and the employment formula linked to federal grants and loans recipients, as is the case with for-profits. This wave will bring more lawsuits.

Following the suspension of student loans and the imposition of a week-long ultimatum, 15 universities in Tanzania have responded to a ministerial directive to pay back loans issued to them for thousands of so-called ‘ghost’ students. The directive was issued after a recent verification exercise revealed that about 2,192 students receiving loans at 31 universities may not even exist. The universities were given seven days to recover and return the money, estimated to be over TZS3.8 billion (US$1.7 million).

Tanzania’s universities is having trouble with ghosts. The government has suspended student loans worth TZS3.2 billion (US$1.5 million), affecting around 2000 students. This came after a routine verification exercise revealed that some who signed up for loans may not even exist. In a country of more than 100 000 registered tertiary students, 2000 “ghosts” may not seem like a big problem. But when the loan money is being misspent, deliberately or because of poor administration, the entire higher education system is affected, and ultimately the country.

Tanzania has suspended student loans amounting to TZS3.2 billion (US$1.5 million) affecting over 2,000 students, some of whom are believed to be non-existent as they failed to show up during a verification exercise. Media reports said the two-month-long exercise carried out twice was to confirm that the students who were benefiting through the Tanzania’s Higher Education Students’ Loans Board, or HESLB, at various institutions of higher learning actually existed and were legitimate students.

The Obama administration is highlighting growing concern over soaring United States student debt by forming a new enforcement unit to crack down on illegal behaviour by higher education institutions. The Department of Education said that it would create the unit, having taken action recently against several colleges for profiting illegally from students with deceptive marketing and inappropriate federal loans.

The US government administration is creating a new office at the U.S. Department of Education dedicated to investigating and punishing illegal activity at colleges and providing debt relief to defrauded federal loan borrowers. Officials on Monday announced a new “enforcement unit” that will be charged with investigating misconduct at colleges, imposing administrative actions against colleges and resolving student loan debt relief claims linked to fraud. The administrative reshuffling will speed up and improve the quality of the department’s investigations of wrongdoing.

A NSW government minister has launched a blistering attack on the federal government's administration of the scandal-ridden private vocational education sector. The sector has been plagued by allegations of dodgy private providers recruiting tens of thousands of students through free laptops and targeting illiterate, disabled students to sign them up to tens of thousands of dollars worth of taxpayer-funded student debt through the federal government's HECS-style VET-FEE help program.