Fake Universities, Fraudulent Counsellors Foil Students’ Study Abroad Ambitions.

News Source:- The joy of 17-year-old Rashmi (name changed) from Punjab’s Jalandhar knew no bounds when she got to know that she had been admitted to a private college in Australia. This was partly made possible because of a Punjab-based education counsellor who not only helped her choose a college but also completed all her visa formalities. Soon Rashmi was on a flight to Sydney, eagerly looking forward to attending college.

However, she sensed something was amiss right after she landed and started making calls to enquire about her class timings. All her calls went unattended. Perplexed, she landed up at her college the next day only to find a deserted building with a lock on its main gate at the spot where the college was supposed to be. “I called my counsellor back in India, who told me that the college was not operating due to the pandemic. He has promised that once the situation becomes normal, classes will resume,” she says. What is worrying is that she does not even know the course that she is enrolled in as her counsellor handled everything for her.

That was over a month ago. Rashmi still has no clue if and when she will be able to start attending her classes. Now, the sinking feeling that she could have been duped by the counsellor, who offered her admission to a substandard college, has set in.

Every year, over five lakh students fly out of India to study in countries like the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and other European nations and, like Rashmi, not all of them get into the top educational institutions.

Professor Amarjiva Lochan, an expert at the India Centre for Migration (ICM), which serves as a research think tank to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on international migration and mobility, says that only 30 per cent of the total students who go abroad get admission in established universities. “The remaining 70 per cent either deliberately take admission in substandard universities as they want citizenship by way of education or are duped by education counsellors in the name of offering good education,” he says, who is also the deputy dean of international relations at the University of Delhi.

There have been several cases where students have been deported to India from these countries because the colleges that they had gotten into were being run illegally and in an unauthorised manner. Lochan says that as per his understanding, there are about 700 colleges in Australia that operate out of just three or four rooms. Read More.