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Tales of corruption in Nigeria are many in number. One example is the case of the clerk at the state examinations board who was called to account for the disappearance of $100,000 in exam fees. An analyst of the country says: "There's this perception among officials in Nigeria that national government is there to divide up the booty of oil wealth." That political culture then filters through to layers below, to the point where even local police or school teachers or receptionists at public hospitals may consider it their right to demand bribes. "It's about people monetizing their position in society so that even people with the lowest amount of authority will use that to extract a small amount."

Members of a special team at the Education Department that had been investigating widespread abuses by for-profit colleges have been marginalized, reassigned or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees. The investigative team had been created in 2016 after the collapse of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges, which set off a wave of complaints from students about predatory activities at for-profit schools. The institutions had been accused of widespread fraud that involved misrepresenting enrolment benefits, job placement rates and program offerings, which could leave students with huge debts and no degrees.

More than 160 students — nearly 30 percent of the student body — at D.C.’s celebrated Duke Ellington School of the Arts live outside the city and are not paying the tuition required of suburbanites who attend the District’s public schools, an internal investigation has found. The findings, which city officials announced Friday, come amid intensifying distrust of the District’s public schools, stoked by scandals involving inflated graduation rates and a former chancellor skirting enrolment rules for his daughter.

The post-Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination or post- gives universities a second chance to screen prospective students who have come through the national matriculation examination system. Earlier this year, the Education Minister announced that the government had lifted a ban imposed in June 2016 on the post-UTME. But the Ministerwarned against institutions charging exorbitant fees for the exam and directed the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board or JAMB to compile a list of institutions charging above NGN2,000 (US$5.50), according to a local media report.

Ways in which students cheat are either ingenious or surprisingly obvious. Why do students cheat, and risk having to retake a module, having their degree classification lowered, or even being kicked out of university? There are many reasons – including financial pressure, poor organisational skills and panic – sometimes among young people who should never have gone to university in the first place or, at the very least, who should have had more support structures in place when they started.

As the University of KwaZulu-Natal medical school’s places for sale saga develops, more information has emerged regarding the alleged syndicate’s national links to other universities. The Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University (SMU) said this week that they were following up on the observations from the UKZN investigation, implicating certain individuals associated with SMU. SMU’s investigation follows the arrests in Durban of three individuals alleged to have been selling places to study medicine and other health science courses at UKZ for a fee of up to R500 000.

South Korea’s newly elected president has made breaking down the near-monopoly of the country’s top universities on the best jobs a cornerstone of his campaign and has repeated a pledge made by different parties in past elections to bring down tuition fees – which are among the highest in the world. In particular, he said he will tackle the ‘old boys’ network’ and dominance of the country’s top-ranked universities in securing the best jobs in business and politics for their alumni, in order to improve prospects for young graduates outside the capital, Seoul.

Calls for greater government action have been made as university students have emerged as prime targets for Ponzi scheme fraud. This after at least 4,000 students from one university were threatened with expulsion after they diverted their tuition fees worth a total of US$6.5 million into an online Ponzi scheme which has since suspended its operations without explanation. At Osun State University over 4,000 students were served with notice that they may be expelled from the university if they failed to pay, by the end of February, all outstanding tuition fees. At a time of severe economic recession, the loss of the investment adds pressure on parents, many of who are victims of Nigeria’s massive unemployment rate.