Mitigating corruption in higher education

The lack of academic integrity, fraud, and other forms of unethical behaviour are problems that higher education faces in both developing and developed countries, at mass and elite universities, and public and private institutions. While academic misconduct is not new, massification, internationalization, privatization, digitalization, and commercialization have placed ethics higher on the agenda for many universities (Denisova-Schmidt and De Wit 2017; Denisova-Schmidt 2018, 2019; Bretag 2020). Corruption in academia is particularly unfortunate, not only because of the high social regard that universities have traditionally enjoyed but also because students— young people in critical formative years—spend a significant amount of time within these educational institutions. How they experience corruption while enrolled might influence their personal and professional future, the future of their country, and much more.