‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK

Universities in Britain rely on overseas applicants paying full fees, which has given rise to some unscrupulous recruiters and left many hopefuls and their families deep in debt

Samira Shackle

hen Sam started looking into studying abroad, it didn’t take long for his phone to start ringing. At 24, he was living with his parents in a small city in the southern Indian state of Odisha and he’d been stuck in an entry-level job for four years. He hoped a master’s degree in the UK might lead to a high-flying finance job in London, or at least give him an edge when he came back home.

After filling in a few forms on study abroad websites, Sam soon started receiving calls from unknown numbers. Eventually, he answered one. The person on the phone was an education agent – a recruiter who helps students apply to foreign universities – pitching his services. The offer sounded appealing. The agency would help Sam decide which universities to apply to, advising on the most suitable courses and where he had the best chance of admission. They would help draft his application, and if he got in, assist with immigration. They would do all of this for free. “I was sceptical,” said Sam. “Like, why would you do that?”

The agent explained that they didn’t need to charge students because the universities paid a commission. Other agencies kept calling, too. Sam (not his real name) spoke to half a dozen, all eager to handle his application. Some immediately gave him a bad vibe. “It was all just for money, they wanted to get me admitted into any university at the fastest pace possible,” he said. In the end he went with an agent from Edvoy, a large firm, who seemed to give him more frank advice. The agent told Sam that his bachelor’s degree in commerce from a small-town university did not hold much value, so he needed to be realistic about his prospects in the UK. Sam wanted to go into the process open-eyed. He signed up.

Each year, about 400,000 international students are granted study visas to the UK. A significant proportion do so with the help of education agents: middlemen paid by universities to find foreign students. In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate. In 2021, Priya Kapoor (not her real name) took a job working for StudyIn, a large education consultancy, in a major Indian city. It was her first job out of university. The pay was good, but she didn’t know what to expect. What she found was something akin to a factory production line, where students were the product.

The first part of the production line were the agents – sometimes referred to as admissions consultants – who brought in students and acted as their main point of contact. Inevitably, Kapoor said, their advice on where to apply was often coloured by which institutions paid the highest commission. This is widely accepted to be the case across agencies. “Whichever college pays more gets more students. It’s not rocket science,” said Prabakaran Srinivasan, an independent education agent based in Tamil Nadu, who is critical of unethical practices in the sector. (Universities are not legally required to disclose what they pay to agents, and many treat details of rates as commercially sensitive information, sometimes refusing freedom of information requests on this basis.)

Next in the chain was Kapoor’s team, which was responsible for the applications. Her job title was “statement of purpose editor” and her role was to interview students about their life and use that information to write personal statements on their behalf. To pay their fees, most students she spoke to planned to take out huge loans, often secured against their parents’ homes or agricultural land. They did so on the assumption that after graduation, they would earn enough to pay back the loan. “They had no idea about sponsorship, no idea about visas. They just thought, ‘I’ll go there and I’ll get a job,’” Kapoor told me. From what she saw, admissions consultants rarely enlightened them. “Agents do anything to avoid further questions,” she said. “The attitude was: you’re just another application to me, and I have targets to complete.’”….

https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/apr/07/brutal-reality-of-life-as-a-foreign-student-in-the-uk

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