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Politicians obliged universities to hire friends in return for help in ensuring a steady flow of funds. By forging documents and bribing appropriate officials, university staff secure larger retirement checks than they are entitled to and retire before the customary age.

In 1998, the education watchdog group from Bombay, the Forum for Fairness in Education, won a landmark case that clamped down on secretive admissions practices. The court ruled that all colleges and universities must make entrance-examination scores public, to ensure that admissions are based on merit, and not money passed under the table.

Ten weeks in charge of Belgrade's most unruly high school killed its Director's passion for education. Few of the staff members were willing to cooperate with her efforts to stop a system of bribery for good grades. When the police caught one math teacher accepting a marked 50-euros note from a student and the problem came out into the open, the teachers rebelled against her with a vote of no confidence in her authority.

Reported instances of bribery and corruption increased sharply last year on campuses throughout Russian Federation. More than 1,000 incidents of bribe-taking and related abuses by administrators and professors were confirmed in 2001, an increase of 32 percent over the 2000 levels.

It is estimated that Russian students and their parents annually spend between $2 billion and $ 5 billion in bribes. And it costs between $ 10 000 and $ 15 000 in bribes to gain acceptance into well-regarded institutions of higher learning in Moscow.