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When 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 Delhi. 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.’”
To an extent, Kapoor could understand this mentality: the pace of work was frenetic. As January deadlines approached, she was writing up to 20 applications a day. She had to prioritise. The better the university, the more time she took. As a rule of thumb, Russell Group applications got about half an hour. The lower-ranked universities that made up the vast majority of Kapoor’s workload got, on average, 15 minutes each. “Some of them weren’t the best, but nobody cared as we knew they’d get through,” she said. “Every day I did about five applications for Coventry and I knew all the students would get in.” At Coventry University, 42% of students are international; it spent almost £45m on agent commissions in 2023-24. A spokesperson for the university strongly disputed Kapoor’s account of their admissions practices, saying it was “far removed from the truth” and stated that only 55% of applicants receive and accept offers. When asked for further details, such as the percentage who simply receive an offer rather than receive and accept, they referred me back to their previous statement.
Once students got their offers, they were passed on to the visa team, and finally delivered to universities as a fully wrapped, fee-paying package. Over time, Kapoor felt worse and worse about her role in this system. “I knew if I worked on 100 applications, 98 were getting nowhere with their life,” she said. “I mean, I woke up and I started lying, then I slept lying, and I woke up only to lie again.” Eventually, she quit the job. In response to these claims, a spokesperson for StudyIn said they “certainly do not reflect our ethos or operational practice”, adding that the organisation “takes the integrity of student applications and the quality of advice we provide extremely seriously”.
In the UK, a quarter of total university income is generated by international students, who pay much higher fees than home students. To attract them, British universities rely on vast, largely unregulated networks of agents operating primarily in Asia and Africa. “It’s become a dogfight for students,” said Gautham Kolluri, an education agent based in Canada. The industry, which helps students apply not just to the UK but to the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and beyond, is thriving in India. Each year more than a million students travel overseas to study.
The reason British universities spend so much to attract international students is simple: if they were to rely solely on home students, they would go bust. In 2012, the coalition government slashed direct grants to universities and raised the annual cap on tuition fees to £9,000. In the intervening 14 years, fees for undergraduates from the UK have barely risen – the maximum was increased to £9,250 in 2017 and by a further £285 in 2025 – even as this sum has been drastically devalued by inflation. The result has been a catastrophic funding crisis. The easiest solution has been to recruit international students, whose fees are not capped. They sometimes pay three times as much as their domestic counterparts for the same courses. At the same time that universities have been pushed into recruiting more and more foreign students, successive governments have pledged to cut immigration. Caught between these contradictory forces are students such as Sam, betting everything on a system that was not designed to work for them.
The image many people have of an international student is a rich kid from the globe-trotting elite. In the 2000s, there was some basis for this stereotype. One person who worked for a London university during this period told me that his remit was to find “well-connected socialites” in China who could recruit other wealthy young people from their social circles. “We were looking for the kind of person for whom money is no object,” he said.
Someone who worked in university recruitment from 2010 to 2018 told me she left the sector as things changed. “My first job was at a Russell Group university, where most foreign students were well-off, and it was clear that they were coming out with a solid degree,” she said. Later, when she moved to a postgraduate law school, her experience was different. “Many overseas students were struggling financially, getting into huge amounts of debt because they’d been told it would be easy to find a job in law afterwards. It felt morally wrong.” A 2018 study by an Indian university surveyed students attending an English-language training school in the hopes of studying abroad and found that 80% came from farming families, mostly from small farms.
Between 2017 and 2022, the number of new overseas entrants to UK universities almost doubled – and in 2021 an industry body estimated education agents were involved in roughly half of international admissions. Some in the sector suggest the number is likely to be even higher. The UK does not collect official data on education agents, but the Australian government does, and it recently found that agents were involved in almost 80% of international student admissions. The rise of this industry has mostly happened below the radar. In India, large agencies have sprung up, striking deals with international universities – they typically receive between 15% and 30% of a student’s fees – but operating through vast networks of subagents who do not always adhere to ethical standards. “A lot of subagents have never travelled to the country or institution they’re recruiting for,” said Kolluri. “Everyone just wants the money. I see it as student trafficking.”
Kolluri mentioned that some of the subagents within the industry hardly even speak English. The same can be true of students themselves. Kapoor wondered how some of the students she worked with would cope in the UK. “Their English was poor and their grades weren’t great. How are you going to get through a master’s degree when you can’t write an essay?” To qualify for a student visa, applicants must pass an English test. But I spoke to several university lecturers who identified language as a real problem. “It’s commonplace to have students who can barely speak English,” one academic at a Russell Group university told me. “They’re clearly just there because the university wants their fees. It’s so, so cynical.” Another academic, from a top-ranked London university, told me: “I remember one Chinese student bursting into tears when I asked a question in a seminar, because she couldn’t understand.”
In the 2010s, British universities relied heavily on Chinese students, who by 2019 made up almost a third of all international students. But there was a persistent anxiety in government and within higher education that this over-reliance on a single country left universities highly exposed to geopolitical shifts. As part of an effort to address this, in 2019, Boris Johnson announced a new work visa that would allow students to stay on for two years after completing their degree, without any restrictions on how much they had to earn or what kind of job they could do. (A previous version of this visa was scrapped by Theresa May in 2012 on the grounds it was “too generous”.) Johnson’s visa change, which came into effect in mid-2021, brought the UK more in line with the US, Australia and Canada, its main competitors for international students. The message was clear: come here, study here, work here.
Numbers of international students soared. The government had set the target of having 600,000 international students enrolled by 2030; this number was surpassed a decade ahead of schedule, and kept climbing, before peaking in 2022-23 at over 758,000. By 2022, India had displaced China as the single largest source of international students. Indian and Nigerian students, in particular, tended to be older than the typical Chinese student and often travelled with their families. After their graduate visas expired, many in this cohort obtained skilled worker visas by taking jobs as low-paid carers.
As net migration figures shot up, the mood in Westminster soured. The Conservative government responded by first restricting students from bringing their families with them, then introducing a minimum salary threshold of £38,700 for a skilled worker visa – a near 50% increase. When Labour came into power in 2024, they increased the threshold again to £41,700, and announced plans to reduce the post-study work visa from two years to 18 months. The promise implied in a lot of international student recruitment is that students can stay on and work after graduation, but this is becoming harder and harder.
When Sam accepted an offer for a master’s degree in finance at the University of Dundee in 2023, he took out a loan of £25,000 to cover the £17,000 university fees, plus other costs. This was more than five times his annual salary. His family did not have any assets to secure it against, which meant a higher interest rate. Six months after graduation, fixed monthly repayments of £300 would begin. That was almost his entire monthly salary in India, but Sam calculated that if he could get a job in the UK paying at least £25,000 during his two years on a graduate visa, he’d be able to pay off a significant chunk of the loan.
“I was in a delusion that I’d get a job really easily,” Sam said. What he didn’t realise was that the terms of the deal he was accepting – debt now, opportunity later – had already been reset by decisions made in Westminster.
Many prospective international students see Britain as a place of wealth and opportunity, so it can be a shock to arrive and be confronted by a housing crisis and a brutal job market. In January 2022, a young man called Ajith (not his real name) started a master’s in digital marketing at Oxford Brookes University. Ajith, who came from a village in Tamil Nadu, was 24 and frustrated he wasn’t getting the kind of jobs he wanted in India. He secured a loan against his family’s agricultural land. According to Ajith, his education agent, from StudyIn, had told him that “getting part-time work to support myself while studying is easy, finding accommodation is easy and finding a job afterwards is easy”.
The first thing that hit Ajith when he arrived was the cold. The second was the realisation that none of what he’d been told was true. He had not secured university accommodation, so he rented an Airbnb for the first fortnight while looking for a place to live. He quickly discovered that to rent property in the UK, you need payslips and references from a previous landlord. He had neither. Panicking, Ajith called the agent in India for advice. The agent told him to walk around the city to find “for rent” signs, and then blocked his number. “That’s when I realised, they’re giving fake promises and they’re lying,” said Ajith. In response to these claims, a spokesperson for StudyIn said: “We care deeply about the experience of every student, but equally we do not think it’s reasonable to conclude anything about our service based on the unsubstantiated comments of one student dating from over five years ago.”
For two months, Ajith bounced between Airbnbs, burning through his remaining loan money, until he managed to get a job at Aldi. Working 20 hours per week – the maximum his visa allowed – he earned £900 a month. He found a room. The rent was £650, which left £250 for everything else. “I was working for rent, basically,” he said. “I worked hard for survival.” Meanwhile, he was also trying to study.
Sam had a better experience with his agent at Edvoy, and on his advice, he had secured accommodation in Dundee on SpareRoom before leaving India. As he settled into university life, making friends from all over the world, Sam quickly developed a taxonomy of his fellow international students. At one end were the wealthy, there for the experience. At the other were those who had no real interest in studying and only wanted to find paid work in the UK. In the middle – where Sam placed himself – were the middle-class strivers. “You’re trying to take studies seriously but you also need money to get by,” he said. Within weeks of arrival, he started applying for graduate trainee roles in finance, as well as part-time work in the corporate sector. He received blanket rejections. He lowered his expectations, applying for more junior corporate roles, and anything vaguely adjacent – customer service at a bank, assistant at an accountancy firm – but the rejections continued. “I was confused. I was overwhelmed,” he said. “The job search was a full-time role in itself, and I had academic work. It was a really tough time.”
The terms of Sam’s loan left little room for things to go wrong. “The cost of living was really, really high, and it felt like every month the expenses grew,” he said. By Christmas, he was panicking. He broadened his search beyond corporate jobs, towards anything that would pay the bills. Eventually, through other international students, he found a string of part-time jobs – cashier at a sweet shop, flyering for a fish and chip shop, collecting glasses in a nightclub. “I had to work, so I just accepted it,” he said. “But it was hard on my mental health.”
More than two-thirds of all full-time students in the UK now take on paid work during term-time. For international students, the financial pressure can be especially sharp. Some work cash in hand to get around the 20-hour limit imposed by their visa. Others travel long distances for menial work in factories or warehouses. In December 2024, a group of five Indian students living in Leicester were involved in a car accident as they drove home at 5.45am from a night shift at a warehouse. Chiranjeevi Panguluri, a 32-year-old master’s student, was killed instantly, and two of the other students in the car were seriously injured.
This was an exceptional tragedy, but the work this group of students was doing was not unusual. On social media, there is a whole genre of videos made by Indian students in the UK showcasing “a day in the life” of their work in Amazon or Evri warehouses. “This is how student life goes,” says one young man, auto-dubbed in English, as he films himself starting a night shift at DPD. He describes his schedule that day: up at 6am, leaving the house at 8am for university, getting home at 4.30pm, sleeping until 6pm, cooking dinner, before leaving for a night shift that will run from 11pm until 4am.
A quick search on Instagram turns up scores of videos offering advice on how to find a job, with titles such as “warehouses in the UK hiring now” or urging readers to comment to get tip sheets on finding part-time work. “You’re not behind,” says one advice video. “You just need better directions.” The message of these videos is that this is part of the hustle, and that it will all be worth it for a British degree. “Go for the course, go for something you want to be in life,” says one YouTuber as he chats to Indian students in Leicester about their studies and efforts to find part-time work. “I say every time, don’t give up. You have to go again, go again, go again.”
Sam graduated from Dundee in autumn 2024. His family couldn’t afford to come to the UK for the ceremony, so he attended alone. He had enjoyed his master’s degree in finance and felt well supported by the university’s careers service. But he was anxious about what would come next. He was still frantically filling out job applications. None were successful. Now he had finished his studies, he was no longer restricted to working 20 hours a week, so he took whatever shifts he could at the sweet shop and takeaway in Dundee where he regularly worked.
Even for domestic graduates in the UK, the jobs market is bruisingly competitive: in 2024, employers reported 140 applications for every graduate vacancy. For international students, it is even tougher. They must find an employer who is licensed to sponsor their visa, and since July 2025, anyone applying for a skilled worker visa must also earn at least £41,700. Given that the median graduate starting salary is about £32,000, this is an extremely high bar. In 2025, Janhavi Jain, a recent graduate from the Warwick Business School, posted on X: “I have tonnes of people text me about coming to the UK for master’s, I will tell you to not come, 90% of my batch had to go back because there are no jobs, unless you have money to throw, don’t consider it.” The tweet struck a chord, getting hundreds of reposts and even a write-up by NDTV, a major Indian broadcaster. “The response was crazy,” Jain told me. “I realised this was a universal experience.”
For students from less prestigious universities, the route to a high-paying graduate job is even less clear. Ajith, the digital marketing student, spent every spare hour on the Aldi shop floor and had no time for the unpaid work experience that might have helped him build his CV. “I’m doing one job, which makes it impossible to get the other kind of job,” he said. Four months after finishing his master’s, he returned to Tamil Nadu. He now works as a supervisor at a factory near his family home, earning £300 per month. “I had a lot of dreams, but everything was spoiled,” he told me. “I came back with a broken heart.”
Sam continued to stick it out in the UK, but his costs were mounting. In the spring of 2025, six months after graduation, the fixed loan repayments of £300 per month kicked in. He needed extra work, and through friends, found shifts at a vegetable packing factory on Dundee’s outskirts, washing and packaging vegetables for Tesco and Aldi. The commute was an hour and a half on public transport, so he split the taxi fare with a group of other students and recent graduates who were doing the same job. He worked 10-hour shifts at minimum wage. “By that time, my ego had died, so I had accepted: OK, we can do this,” he told me.
Sam’s total income was between £1,200 and £1,600 per month, depending on how many shifts he got. Most of the money went on rent and loan repayments. When his family in India asked how the job hunt was going, he got angry. He kept applying for corporate jobs but it was hard to stay hopeful.
To solve the university funding crisis, the government either needs to substantially raise tuition fees or reinstate direct state grants. Neither option is politically palatable, so instead, Conservative and Labour governments have oscillated between encouraging universities to attract international students and making Britain a less appealing place for them. “It’s completely disjointed policymaking,” said Brian Bell, who until March 2026 was chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, a public body that advises the government. “The reason there’s no joined-up strategy is that everyone knows what is required: British students have to pay more for their education to cover the costs.”
After the Conservatives barred foreign students from bringing their partners and children in 2024, applications for student visas dropped, almost immediately, by 14%. That year, nearly one in four leading universities cut budgets and staff. Dundee had to be bailed out by the Scottish government. By October 2025, the University and College Union said they’d tracked more than 15,000 job cuts in a single year. “The dependents ban was not the only thing behind job cuts, but it was a big contributing factor,” said Harry Anderson, deputy director at Universities UK.
Against this backdrop, it is little surprise that institutions continue to invest in overseas recruitment, working through education agent networks to rebuild numbers. “I always joke that if I want to make money, I’ll go back into education consulting,” said Kapoor, the former statement of purpose editor, who now works in the media. “If I’d stayed, I’d be making four times what I am now.” The landscape has changed since Kapoor was working in this field: statement of purpose editors are still in demand, but the role is more focused on humanising AI output.
In recent years, this industry has started to receive more scrutiny. In 2024, the Migration Advisory Committee warned the government that “rogue recruitment agents pose a threat to the integrity of our immigration system, with poor practices exploiting student and graduate visa holders mis-sold UK higher education”. (This echoed a 2019 parliamentary inquiry in Australia, which found that “international students were vulnerable, open to exploitation by unscrupulous education agents, and a lack of regulation enabled them to operate without any consequences for their actions”).
In 2025, the Labour government moved to regulate education agents, requiring them to avoid misleading claims and to disclose conflicts of interest. But given the reality of how the industry works – with layers of subcontracting and a commission-based incentive structure – it is difficult to see how this can be policed. More broadly, the problem is not solely rogue agents. “We have a code of ethics for agents,” said Vincenzo Raimo, who has worked in international student recruitment for 25 years. “But what about a code of ethics for universities and the way we recruit students?”
Sam left the UK and flew home to Odisha in October 2025, a year after graduating. It was the first time he’d seen his family in two years and it was a relief to no longer try to cope alone. But he was also filled with shame. His father’s wholesale business was not doing well and rather than being able to help out, Sam was costing the family money. His father and brother agreed to split the £300 monthly loan repayments while Sam got back on his feet. He found a six-month internship at an investment firm and moved to Delhi to take it up. The internship is unpaid. He hopes it will lead to a job, but even if it does, the salary will be no more than £400 a month. Meanwhile, the repayments on the loan have a decade left to run. “I think there’s no right, no wrong,” Sam told me, philosophically. “But if I had the chance to go back in time, I would not have done this.”
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