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Perth’s Murdoch University and other universities have become heavily reliant on foreign student fees to bolster their incomes. 50 professors from the Australian Research Council’s Laureate Fellowship condemned the decision to take legal action against an associate professor from the university. Deeply concerned about the integrity of academic teaching, the professor complained on television that the university was not only enrolling international students whose English was inadequate but also allow them to graduate.

As another school year begins in Afghanistan, the country continues to face insecurity, an epidemic of corruption within its education system and old customs that keep many students and qualified teachers away from classrooms. Violence and corruption are problems that can hardly be solved on grassroots level only. Increased violence forced more than 1,000 schools to shut their doors since 2016 and according to a report compiled by the country’s independent corruption monitor, corruption is “devastating” the education system and the country.

Thanks to the introduction of a new biometric census system, education authorities discovered the presence of 47000 fictitious students in public and private universities in the capital Conakry. Thanks to this information, the government will able to better equip its universities and teaching staff, by making sure that funds are directed where they are most needed. The Minister of Higher Education has indicated that this process may also pave the way for the introduction of an automated university access system.

There is a wide consensus among policymakers and practitioners that while access to education has improved significantly for many children in low- and middle-income countries, learning has not kept pace. Information is a key building block of a wide range of strategies that attempts to tackle weaknesses in service delivery and accountability at the school level, even where political systems disappoint at the national level.

Two years ago, a Polish economist leading a private university in Warsaw, was contacted by headhunters from Moscow. They had spotted his profile on LinkedIn and wanted a Russian-speaking European university leader to reform the prominent Narxoz University in Almaty, a city in the far east of vast Kazakhstan, a few hours’ drive from the borders of north-western China. Sixteen months into his job as rector, he told Times Higher Education about his efforts to root out cheating, plagiarism, corruption and staid teaching, which have led to the firing of hundreds of academics.