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As part of its drive to clamp down on excessive tutoring and elite private schools that prepare students for the best universities, the South Korean government has ordered almost a dozen universities to revamp their admissions tests to bring them more in line with the normal high school curriculum. The ministry of education has said it will look into punishing the universities who have violated the regulations, including a partial ban on recruiting students for the 2019 academic year. Meanwhile, the Korean Council for University Education found that more than 1,500 college admission essays submitted to universities last year were suspected of being plagiarised.

The Malaysian government announced the allocation of seats at public universities last week, and it sparked uproar among ethnic Chinese and Indians. Only 19% of places were awarded to Chinese and 4% to Indian students – and even some with the highest exam scores failed to gain a place on their preferred course. The ethnic breakdown of the Malaysian population is 23% Chinese and 7% Indian, while 60% are Malay according to the most recent census. The results prompted the treasurer general of the Malaysian Indian Congress,– to say it was "the most unfair and biased public university intake in the history of Malaysia".

Afghan education officials have found themselves embroiled in controversy after a record number of students failed in national university entry exams last week. Afghan students accuse the Higher Education Ministry, which determines university placement, of fraud and discrimination, insisting that as many as 60,000 of them failed purely on the basis of their ethnicity and mother language.

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.