On my recent visit to India, a high school counselor shared the story of one of her bright students, who seemingly is caught in an agent’s web and is considering a suspicious admissions offer from a reputable university overseas. Suspicious because the agent is demanding, among other things, backdated letters from the high school.
At the same time, the U.S. State Department had canceled more than 2,000 student visa appointments across India, citing suspected fraud. With no visa slots available across India for the entire month of April, I joined a WhatsApp group of students aspiring to study in the U.S. — refreshing appointment portals constantly, sharing rumors, clinging to hope. The mood is unmistakable: despair, frustration, and mounting panic. Students who’ve done everything right are suddenly finding themselves at the mercy of a system cracking under the weight of its own negligence.
This is more than a student crisis. It’s a branding crisis for the United States. And a moral reckoning for international education.
There was a time when international education was built on a promise — to open minds, build bridges, and expand opportunity. But somewhere along the way, that purpose was hijacked. Today, in too many corners of our industry, the promise has been replaced by profit, and the bridge-building by brokerage. What we’re seeing now is the industrialization of student recruitment, where the loudest voices are not educators or mentors, but salespeople boasting about revenue-sharing, lead generation, and market capture.
Scroll through LinkedIn, and the narrative is unmistakable: a celebration of commissions over counseling, enrollment numbers over student readiness, and monetization over mission. Agents parade MoU figures like trophies. Aggregators tout their “revenue opportunities.” And universities — the very institutions that should be setting the standard — have become not just participants in this ecosystem, but enablers of its worst instincts.
The rise of this middleman economy has been rapid and largely unregulated. What began as a support mechanism to help students navigate complex systems has morphed into an industry that rewards speed over substance. Students are no longer being guided; they’re being funneled — into universities that pay the most, into programs they may not understand, and into futures shaped more by incentives than intention. Many of these “advisors” are untrained, unlicensed, and often more focused on meeting quotas than mentoring students. And the real tragedy? This model isn’t an aberration — it’s becoming the norm.
And while it’s easy to blame the agents and aggregators, we must confront the deeper issue: institutional complicity. Universities, often under pressure to meet aggressive international enrollment targets, have quietly normalized these practices. Deals are inked with little to no due diligence. MoUs are signed with firms that have never set foot in a classroom. Some institutions even claim they “vet” their partners, yet turn a blind eye to ghost counseling, forged documents, or underprepared applicants — all in exchange for guaranteed numbers.
Meanwhile, the student experience suffers. Uninformed choices, visa denials, academic underperformance, and cultural unpreparedness are too often swept under the rug as anomalies rather than systemic failures. The fallout isn’t just a dropped class or a missed opportunity — it’s broken trust, wasted money, and, in many cases, futures derailed.
So what should universities be doing instead?
They need to reclaim their role as educators and stewards — not consumers in a global enrollment marketplace. They need to:
Build genuine, long-term relationships with schools, rather than transactional ones with agents.
Invest in credible in-country representatives — those with relevant training, experience, and institutional alignment, not the low-cost, underqualified hires funneled through employer-of-record providers focused on minimizing expenses, not maximizing impact.
Create direct access channels for students and families, embed AI-powered tools to improve transparency, and commit to supporting the counselors and communities that shape these students’ decisions.
Above all, institutions must stop pretending they are passive participants in this game. They are the ones writing the rules — and they have both the power and responsibility to change them.
To reset the system, we need bold, structural change.
That begins with a global licensing framework for counselors and agents — a real one, not a marketing badge or a vendor certification. This license should be based on case-study evaluations, deep knowledge of ethical and cultural counseling, and annual renewal requirements. Without this, we’re leaving student futures in the hands of the unqualified and unaccountable.
We also need transparent partnership registries where institutions publicly disclose who they work with, on what terms, and with what results. Let students and schools evaluate these partnerships as publicly as we evaluate university rankings.
Next, we must redefine success. Let’s stop measuring performance by the number of heads in seats, and start tracking student-centric metrics like academic persistence, graduation rates, career outcomes, and satisfaction with the recruitment process. Because what gets measured gets managed — and we’re currently managing the wrong things.
Finally, we need to shift the financial model. Instead of pouring money only into commissions and bonuses, universities should redirect some of the funds toward capacity-building in schools, especially those in underserved regions. Imagine a model where schools are funded not for converting students, but for preparing them. Where outreach is designed to inform, not influence. Where the goal isn’t enrollment at any cost, but readiness at every step.
We can’t keep rewarding those who game the system best. Nor can we let the future of global education be dictated by who shouts the loudest about revenue. The institutions that care — truly care — must lead by example. They must build with integrity, partner with purpose, and put students first. Because international education was never meant to be a transaction. It was meant to be a transformation.
And transformation, by definition, requires courage.
Ex cogitatione, progressus.
Girish
