Every month, at least one family walks into my Dhaka office of Graduate Track with a study-abroad plan that would make a banker nervous. The family argues that a cousin’s son got into a university in Melbourne, Australia, so their daughter should too — at an educational institute nobody in Melbourne has heard of and studying a subject which the student has never mentioned wanting. The tuition is due in nine days. They have read three Facebook posts about Australia and one cousin’s WhatsApp voice note. That is what often happens.
There are many organizations that provide counselling services to Bangladeshi students who study abroad and are willing to do so. But there are transparent financial guidance-related, biased recommendation-based, and other gaps that keep walking. Families are not starving for information. These are available — but they are rather drowning in it. What they can not find is someone who will make sense of it for their particular case. The United Kingdom puts its student visa rules online. Canada puts up its study permit requirements. Many other countries do so. Everything is published, and still, every single day, families or service seekers slip into the gap between what is written as rules and what it actually means for them.
Gaps are not just an inconvenience; they cost families real money. The playbook most are using expired a while ago, and nobody told them about it. For example, an Australian student visa application now costs A$2,500 — just the application fee, which an applicant loses even if he/she is refused by the concerned authority. Recent reforms have also made it much harder for many applicants to bring family along, or to switch educational institutes halfway through.
If anyone wants to study in Canada, meanwhile, he/she needs to show significantly more money in the bank now before the authority issues a study permit. Moreover, Canada’s new fraud checks mean a single sloppy document can sink the whole application. The UK keeps moving its own goalposts as well: London applicants now have to show £1,570 a month in maintenance funds, and the Graduate Route — the post-study work visa that used to sell the UK almost by itself — has spent the last couple of years under political fire.
None of these is hidden. Immigration departments of destination countries publish every change within hours of deciding it. The problem was never access to information. It is often the influence of others and counselling gaps. A few weeks ago, a mother sat in my office and quoted, word for word, what her neighbor’s son had told her neighbor. That was the entire basis for a decision worth two crore BDT (approximately $162,291 USD). Cousin’s advice, a Facebook group, and whatever the nearest agent happened to say over one cup of tea often matter the most.
Meanwhile, different bodies like the British Council’s trained counsellor network and the International Consultants for Education and Fairs (or ICEF agent) training framework exist for exactly this reason: to close the distance between the official policy and what families on the ground actually understand. But most families or service seekers do not sit across from a trained counsellor.
Service seekers do not always get bad advice. They get confident advice from different sources, including counselling organizations and the people who stopped learning abroad years ago. But the regulatory entry barrier for starting study-abroad counselling services in Dhaka is roughly zero or almost absent. On most occasions, organizations call themselves a consultancy for study abroad just by renting a desk and printing a banner, without any strong or centralized government monitoring. New ones pop up every year. But most such organizations sell whatever they sold last year: guaranteed admissions, visa assurance, and big foreign university names which they have never visited and probably could not find on a map.
Counseling organizations that provide some genuine counselling services for study abroad often focus heavily on paperwork and admissions, while leaving critical service gaps in a student’s holistic journey to higher study. An anxious parent often hears certainty and a low fee, which is exactly what they want to hear. But unfortunately, it is also exactly what the current system punishes. Canada’s provincial attestation letter (PAL) system alone has invalidated thousands of half-baked applications that a competent adviser would never have filed.
Moreover, there are a handful of errors or carelessness in completing an application for many. Bank statements do not always match the story. A statement of purpose that reads like it was written for someone else. This is because sometimes it was lifted straight from a template. An application filed against a deadline nobody bothered to check. None of that is the policy’s fault; it is simply carelessness, and it is preventable if the applicant genuinely wants to.
Of course, even flawless applications sometimes face rejection because of unpredictable internal embassy policies. But as immigration rules tighten, these mistakes are getting disastrously expensive. A refused visa used to be embarrassing. Now, with Australia’s fees and the months-long waits at some embassies, a single refusal can mean losing five figures and carrying a black mark into every future application. In Canada, it can go further — if they decide someone misrepresented something, he/she can be barred from applying again for years.
Counselling organizations have the responsibility to service seekers and need to provide honest and right counselling. Honest counsellors compete against people selling certainty, and certainty is a much easier product than homework. But honest counselling is just not enough to sit across the desk from families. Honest and real counselling — the kind that actually works — needs to address the gaps and make sure that service seekers are able to make informed and right decisions.
But government monitoring is important for genuine counseling. Moreover, for most middle-class Bangladeshi families, this is the biggest purchase they will ever make — and somehow the one they search the least. The rules will keep changing. Service seekers need to be able to scrutinize and take the service they need to make informed decisions related to their budget. For this, awareness raising by relevant organizations will be helpful.
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