Search Page

Thousands of university students in Uzbekistan are being mobilized to help with the annual cotton harvest and some say they are working under abusive conditions, RFE/RL's Uzbek Service reports. The harvest lasts from the beginning of the academic year in September until late autumn and only students at prestigious universities in Tashkent are exempt from taking part. The use of student and child labor to pick cotton violates state and international labor laws.

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.

Corruption, funding shortages and an obsession with profit are plaguing the quality of university education in Cambodia, students say, driving them overseas in search of masters and PhD programmes.

New laws to clamp down on academic cheating at China's universities may be implemented as the rampant problems of plagiarism, falsification, lying about credentials and research papers, and other misconduct continue unabated in higher education. However, some experts have said that government-led anti-corruption campaigns are common at times of public dissatisfaction against the authorities, so as to appease the public.

A Chinese Professor has been fired by his university and disqualified from China's Recruitment Program of Global Experts for copying his resume and academic articles from three other academics with the same name. The 39 year-old professor with the Beijing University of Chemical Technology has admitted falsifying his educational background, work experience and published articles by copying the details from overseas professors.

A man assumed the academic identity of a Yale University assistant professor who has the same name as him for several months. The person joined Beijing University of Chemical Technology as a professor in November. His resume listed seven articles published by top English-language academic journals, but the articles were the work of an assistant professor at Yale University.

Students and academics from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong researching the working conditions of student interns at factories in China have said that an officially agreed investigation into working conditions at Foxconn factories, which produce Apple iPads, did not provide a "full picture" of the extent of abuse of the internship system.

Overseas non-governmental organizations have been raising the alarm over worker exploitation in factories in China that produce the Apple iPad and other consumer electronic products. A new report by a Hong Kong-based labour organization has found that many of the exploited are students working as interns as a compulsory part of vocational courses.

In an effort to control increasing cases of plagiarism and low quality research, the All India Council for Technical Education, AICTE, is to launch Project Factory – an online repository aimed at capturing abstracts of all postgraduate projects.

After studying for two years to be a teacher, one student found out that the degree her school offers is worthless. It is a story being replayed across many Indian cities. Poorly regulated, unaccredited and often entirely fake colleges have sprung up as demand for higher education accelerates, driven by rising aspirations and a bulging youth population.