Here are highlights from an account by The Chronicle of Higher Education of Unesco’s devastating new report, “Corrupt Schools, Corrupt Universities: What Can Be Done?”:

Corruption is endemic in many education systems around the world, undermining those systems and costing governments billions of dollars…
National education systems in the developing world are especially vulnerable to pervasive corruption…but widespread ethics violations are by no means confined to those regions…[For example,] in some universities in the former Soviet Union…”admission to universities is entirely corrupt”…
even higher education in the United States is beset with ethical problems…”academic fraud is regarded as a serious threat to the integrity and reliability of certification in higher education, leading to scepticism as to the validity of results and suspicion about real performance…This type of fraud is more prevalent in the United States than in developing countries”…
“major opportunities for corruption”…include examination fraud — often involving impersonation, cheating, favoritism, or gifts — bribes, diploma mills, false credentials, fraudulent research, and plagiarism.
“In some places in India, cheating is now so well established that when universities try to resist, students protest and demand their traditional ‘right to cheat’”…
[With the] explosive growth in the availability of online information…opportunities for new kinds of fraud and corruption have burgeoned…Internet-based companies…sell term papers and…”plagiarism is tending to develop everywhere.” In Sweden, according to a fact sheet accompanying the report, “it is estimated that the number of fake universities on the Internet has risen fourfold during the period 2000-4, from 200 to 800.”

But, take heart. There are glimmers of hope, the report says:

Azerbaijan, for example, succeeded “in reducing fraud in entrance examinations to higher-education institutions…thanks to a combination of measures, including the use of informatics to eliminate any possible interference in the administering, checking, or publishing of exam results.” (“Unesco Report Sees Growing Corruption in Education Systems Worldwide,” Aisha Labi, June 6)