Corruption and Education

Corruption is a societal problem which adversely affects nations’ efforts to improve lives of their citizens. It is normally thought to be centered on government procurement, taxation, and legal decisions and not in education. But it is a problem in education. How serious is it? The difficulty of responding to this question is that corruption in education, as with all illegal and unprofessional activities, is difficult to accurately measure. This limits researchers to predicting institutional and systemic levels of corruption by relying primarily on individual perceptions. Measuring direct experience with corruption is more difficult and hence more rare. Since 1993, Transparency International has taken a global pulse of corruption by conducting the world’s largest corruption survey to derive the Corruption Perception Index and rank nations from the most to the least corrupt. When it comes to corruption research, participants generally hesitate to share their experiences for fear of repercussions, which is why less corruption is likely to be reported than may be actually occurring within education systems. Corruption is manifest in a wide variety of forms. A broad range of literature on corruption in education has been published in the early 21st century, with the goal of defining corruption typologies and examining the effects which corruption has on education systems and those who depend on those education systems. But anticorruption efforts in education have had limited success and more research is needed on non-pecuniary forms of corruption and their relation to elite formation and institutionalized racism.

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