Ajit left his village in southern India for Oxford hoping for better opportunities. But within days of arriving in 2022, he discovered the recruitment agent who found him a course had sold him “fake promises”.
The 27-year-old said an agent for StudyIn UK in Tamil Nadu told him that Oxford Brookes was part of Oxford university and that he was guaranteed an automatic extension of his post-study work visa.
“They told me, I will stay for five years and then I can go directly to ‘indefinite leave to remain’, which is a fake promise,” Ajit told the Financial Times.
The son of a policeman and housewife, he worked long supermarket shifts alongside studying. After two years, Ajit returned home ladened with debts, holding a digital marketing degree that has yet to lead to a job.
Cash-strapped UK universities have in recent years become hugely reliant on international students, whose fees are uncapped. But as higher education institutions have competed over this lucrative stream of overseas income, stories like Ajit’s have become more common, say education and migration experts.
Universities use recruitment agents to find international students for their courses, paying millions of pounds a year in commission.
Enroly, a platform used by international students for managing enrolment, estimated two-thirds of foreign students enter UK universities via agents. Oxford university is among the few institutions that do not use agents.
Rates for agents have historically been between 10 and 30 per cent per recruit’s first year tuition fee, according to experts, which can range as high as £60,000 a year depending on the course and institution.
Occasionally agents charge a flat fee to students for help with selecting and applying to universities, accommodation and visas. There is little practical recourse for students who are peddled misleading information by intermediaries or encouraged into unsuitable courses, experts say.
“We’ve gone down an arms race of higher commission levels to persuade students to choose my university over another university, rather than the one best suited to them,” said Vincenzo Raimo, an international higher education consultant.
Ajit, who asked that his real name not be published, said he used StudyIn, previously named SI-UK, to apply to seven British universities, paying a small handling fee after securing an unconditional offer from Oxford Brookes. His tuition fee was about £16,000 a year.
Founded in 2006, StudyIn processed 210,000 UK university applications by foreign students in the year to March 2025. The consultancy is headquartered in London but has 100 offices in 45 countries.
Chief executive Rob Grimshaw said: “All of our agents have to go through the British Council certification process and StudyIn’s own code of conduct during onboarding. There isn’t such a thing as a perfect system, but we work enormously hard to train our staff and ensure we maintain levels of quality across the network.”
Grimshaw, a former managing director at the FT, added that there are “numerous routes” for students raising complaints and staff “engage quickly and openly”.
“We will follow up this case incredibly vigorously because we never want to be giving the wrong advice and guidance to a student.”
Ajit’s story reflects broader concerns about the system of recruiting students through intermediaries. Last year, the government’s independent migration advisers flagged problems with agents giving “misleading information”.
The Migration Advisory Committee called for mandatory disclosure of how much universities spend on agents and how many students they enrol through them each year.
Natasha Fernandes, an Indian tourism student at University College Birmingham, said she encountered two agents who refused to help her apply to certain UK universities, raising her suspicions of commission-driven bias “because their benefits are more than my benefits in that whole deal”.
Fernandes said agents suggested she would “instantly” find part-time work to start paying down her £14,400 loan for tuition and visa fees alongside her course. Instead the 27-year-old found she needed to take a break from her studies to work, nearly doubling the length of her degree.
“You are doing everything to make ends meet . . . but you’re not able to meet those expectations,” she said.
After the UK graduate route visa was reintroduced in July 2021, Indian student arrivals soared — quadrupling from 34,261 in 2019 to 139,539 in 2022, while those from China declined in that period. Last year the government enforced a ban on dependants, pushing down numbers.
Tripti Maheshwari, co-founder of Student Circus, which helps international students find jobs, said certain Indian students were coming to the UK despite not being well-suited to the courses.
“We’ve been asked by clients to deliver sessions in Hindi because students are not very comfortable with English,” Maheshwari added. “People will put their houses on loan to get the money for student fees and get a visa. Universities and agents together must responsibly recruit students.”
Louise Nicol, Malaysia-based international higher education expert and founder of Asia Careers Group, said “some agents in south Asia sell not just education but work and a path to indefinite leave to remain.
“They promise them: you can settle down and live forever in leafy Kent . . . But that isn’t the reality of what’s available to a lot of international students.”
Vijaykumar Pydi, media head of the UK’s Indian National Student Association, said that often agents tell Indian clients the success rate of foreign graduates getting a sponsored job is more than 60 per cent, when in his experience it is 10 per cent.
Britain’s agent market is unregulated and there is little oversight of whether agent-recruited students succeed at university. But by summer, agents’ names are expected to appear on students’ “confirmation of acceptance” — documents required for visa applications — in a move aimed at increasing transparency.
The higher education sector introduced in 2023 the Agent Quality Framework, which includes an agents’ code of practice and online certification programme organised by the British Council.
“That code of practice for the first time really codifies what standards and professional behaviours are expected of agents,” said Charley Robinson, student mobility lead at Universities UK. She called it a “big step forward”.
But some are sceptical. “It provides a facade of credibility with no actual checks or balances,” said Nicol. “The problem is that we do not know what agents are telling students — I don’t think universities know either.”
Oxford Brookes University said: “We signed up to the UK Agent Quality Framework when it launched, demonstrating our commitment to holding agents to the highest possible standard.”
It added that students with concerns about the actions of agents should report them to the university so they can be “thoroughly investigated”.
The Home Office said it valued the “significant contribution” international students made to the UK, and would continue “to implement measures to ensure they, the institutions they attend and the immigration system are protected from those who wish to exploit it”.
