Search Page

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.

Universities and business schools are grappling with the ethics curricula they teach to professionals and future professionals. This follows damning revelations of state capture involving accountants, auditors and consultants at major international companies. The dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand, said every crisis offers an opportunity. “There is a lot of debate within the senior executive team… we are working with two [international] economists, to develop context in the economics curriculum, it brings to the fore issues of power… so students think about economic systems with a historical perspective”.

Nigeria’s Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board, or JAMB, is the latest agency to come under the spotlight in what is a national crusade to get rid of corruption in higher education. Past registrars of the agency, which is mandated to hold entrance examinations for all students into tertiary institutions, have been asked to give an account of their stewardship and how they managed the agency’s finances. The probe comes in the wake of revelations that JAMB has managed to remit to the Central Bank of Nigeria an impressive total of US$14 million – the highest annual remittance in the last 40 years.

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.

Academics, student unions and opposition parties have condemned the creation by Zimbabwean President of a new ministry – of National Scholarships – against the backdrop of the country’s ongoing economic woes. The appointment of a fully-fledged ministry will pave the way for budgetary allocations in the 2018 budget expected to be tabled in parliament before the end of the year. Critics have said that said the ministry of scholarships was not necessary and that the creation of a new ministry was an attempt by the president and his party ZANU-PF to create “new jobs for the boys”.

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.

A 23-year-old man, residing a stone's throw from Lyon, was arrested on Tuesday morning, 3 October, for trying to fool the higher education scholarship system. During the 2016-2017 school year, the young man had received government money based on the establishment he claimed to be attending the conditions he had declared. The problem was that the student had falsified his university registration document, and Crous, which manages student grants, came to realize it.

The Department of Higher Education and Training will probe claims about predatory publishing, and could withdraw subsidies paid out for the academic articles in question. An analysis by Stellenbosch University researchers found that from 2005 to 2014, South African academics published more than 4,200 papers in 47 journals that were either "probably or possibly predatory". Predatory publishing involves unscrupulous open access publishers who publish articles with little or no real peer review. The government pays a university about R100,000 for an academic article, which has to be published in a journal accredited by the Department of Higher Education and Training.

Zimbabwe’s Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development Minister has lost his Constitutional Court bid to overturn his arrest on charges of allegedly misappropriating around US$450,000 from a manpower development fund that finances students, among other activities. The minister is facing the allegations alongside the Deputy Minister and the Finance Director of Zimbabwe Manpower Development Fund (ZIMDEF). ZIMDEF was established through an act of parliament to fund human capital development.

Tanzania’s flagship University of Dar es Salaam is under investigation by the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee for the mismanagement of university funds. An audit report for the 2014-15 and 2015-16 fiscal years presented to the parliamentary committee earlier this month shows that approximately US$0.5 million was lost on unretired imprest from workers and US$0.2 million on salaries to ghost workers at the university. The committee chairperson suggested that poor financial management at the university was behind the losses.