This week, news broke that Nepali students are being deceived into enrolling in fake universities in the UAE. A ring of education consultancies in Nepal is facing complaints from defrauded students. The universities where they sent students, with promises of international education and post-education employment opportunities, were actually training centres operating in the UAE. Victims, who paid up to Rs1.5 million in the scam, claim that these institutions capitalise on the free zones of Ajman, Sharjah or Dubai, where it is easy to start a business with a simple trade license, circumventing oversight from the UAE’s education authorities. The state-of-the-art infrastructures and equipment showcased on the websites and advertisements of the ‘universities’ do not exist. Instead, they operate from three or four small rooms, and students are told to attend classes online.

This is not the first case of its kind for Nepali students. In 2015, more than 70 of them were stranded in St Lucia after Lambirds Academy, the college they were supposed to attend in the Caribbean island nation, was found not to exist. Victims of an elaborate scam, which included Nepali educational consultancies and foreign scammers, the students paid up to Rs2 million to enroll into the non-existent college. Before that, in January 2014, around 300 Nepali students were left homeless in Malaysia after the institution they were enrolled in turned out to have no legal existence. And in 2012, around 500 Nepali students found themselves without a school in the UK, after the British government banned London Metro University from enrolling non-EU foreign students.

A commonality in all four cases is that the scammed students were sent abroad by education consultancies in Nepal. The proliferation of such consultancies is loosely documented, with regulations sparsely imposed. By 2019, the Ministry of Education had granted operating permits to 1,473 consultancies, with as many speculated to be operational without permits. A major source of income for these consultancies is university commissions, typically a percentage of the student’s first year’s or even subsequent semesters’ tuition fees. Lured by the financial appeal of such commissions, Nepali consultancies often overlook the quality of education and living conditions in such education establishments. The consultancies keep making profits, and foreign institutions improve their enrollment and student diversity, while the students are left stranded. This malevolent machinery that exploits students must be immediately dismantled.

The students who seek better higher education abroad cannot be barred from going. The immediate action, therefore, must be closely monitoring and strictly regulating the process of foreign education. This starts with keeping tabs on the mushrooming of education consultancies. Education Minister Mahabir Pun’s Facebook post on initiating an investigation into the UAE case is welcome. Greater relief, however, lies in improving policy measures to nip such scams in the bud. There must be stringent regulation and harsh punishment for rule-breaking consultancies. Time and again (in the 2015 Lambirds case to the current UAE scam), these organisations feign ignorance about the scams.

The consultancies repeatedly heap the blame on the students, claiming that they knew about such institutions before venturing abroad. That is a poor excuse for destroying careers and swindling hefty sums from student families. It is also indicative of the Nepali state’s failure to act as a guardian to its youths—the country’s most precious asset.