Inside International Education | Issue 13 | 30 May 2026
The Game Is Changing for Education Agents
Three stories. Three countries. Three parts of the pipeline. One direction of travel.
The old playbook, recruit students, move volume, collect commissions, and repeat, is running into structural headwinds from multiple directions simultaneously. In this issue we look at three examples of what that looks like in practice.
Three different stories, three different countries, and three different parts of the international education pipeline describe the same thing: the environment for education agents is being reshaped by forces that have nothing to do with agents directly and everything to do with how governments are responding to a decade of unchecked volume growth.
Volume Is No Longer a Viable Strategy
ApplyBoard was the most visible embodiment of the volume model. Founded in 2015, unicorn status by 2020, the company had been planning an IPO for 2026, but then Canada tightened its international student settings in 2024.
ApplyBoard placed 80,000 students through its platform in 2023. Then Canada moved. New study permit approvals fell 52% in 2024. They are projected to fall a further 62% against 2023 levels in 2025. The company made multiple rounds of cuts, including more than 150 roles in June 2025. Investor Fidelity disclosed it had written off more than 80% of ApplyBoard’s value since 2021. Revenue in 2025 sat at approximately USD 200 million, though this reflects fees flowing through the portal, not net revenue.
The era of frictionless volume growth, where more applications meant more approvals and more commissions, is over.
The lesson here is about the model. Canada is the sharpest example, but destination governments globally have spent the past two years reasserting control over international student intake. Australia tightened genuine student requirements and evidence levels. The UK capped dependent visas. Canada cut new permits to levels not seen in a decade.
Agents whose practice is built on volume rather than outcomes are exposed to the same structural pressure.
Poor Practices Are Becoming a Reputational and Regulatory Liability
VFS Global is the world’s largest visa outsourcing company. It holds contracts with 71 governments and processes applications for workers, students, and family members who have no alternative provider. It is not an agent. But the conduct documented in a Lighthouse Reports investigation published this week is a precise illustration of what happens when an intermediary treats compliance as a floor rather than a standard.
VFS’s profits increased fourfold between 2017 and 2024. Value-added services account for 30% of revenue in a sample of over 2,000 receipts across 16 countries. An Indian subsidiary recorded pre-tax margins of up to 70% on those services, but this growth is not without problems.
The investigation found that VFS staff receive low base salaries with bonuses tied to monthly targets for “value-added services”: premium lounge access, SMS updates, and courier returns. A former officer in Delhi noted that first-time applicants routinely assumed VFS staff were part of the embassy, and that assumption was not corrected.
Scale of exposure
Freedom of Information requests to 22 Schengen governments produced inspection reports showing that contracting governments have known about these problems for years and rarely acted. The investigation ran in 14 media outlets.
That is the scale of reputational damage that lands when the practices catch up with the practitioner. Governments are no longer willing to look away.
Scammers Are Being Picked Up at the Source
Earlier this month, Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley Crime Investigation Office raided 95 education consultancies in a single day, detaining 69 operators and seizing electronic devices including fake government seals.
The allegation: these consultancies had been sending workers to Europe under student visa cover, operating without valid licences, and collecting fees they had no legal authority to charge. One documented case involved a man from Kavre who was offered a job in Croatia at 850 to 1,200 euros a month and charged between Rs700,000 and Rs1 million to arrange it. Roughly AUD 8,000 to AUD 11,000 in fees for an illegally brokered placement. He was one of many. A single operator, Cozmo Educational Consultancy, was accused of defrauding nearly 300 people through similar arrangements.
Of approximately 5,000 registered educational consultancies in Nepal, around 1,000 renewed their licences when the government required it. The rest continued operating after their approvals were automatically revoked. The raids were the first substantial enforcement response.
Origin country enforcement is rare. For years, the assumption was that regulatory accountability flowed from destination countries outward. What Nepal’s raids signal, and similar actions in other source countries point to the same direction, is that governments at the origin end are also starting to act. The pressure on bad actors in the chain is no longer coming only from Canberra or Ottawa. It is coming from Kathmandu too.
The broader effect of that enforcement is positive. Operators who built practices on fraud get removed from the market. But the transition is messy. Legitimate agents in source countries face reputational damage by association. Students who were defrauded are distrustful of the entire category. That distrust travels with them into the Australian recruitment process.
Three Headwinds. One Direction.
Government policy tightening destination intake.
Regulatory scrutiny of intermediary conduct.
Origin country enforcement against fraudulent operators.
None of these pressures is aimed at agents specifically. VFS is not an agent. ApplyBoard is a platform. Nepal’s consultancies were operating outside the registered sector entirely. But each pressure vector lands on the same part of the chain: the people who sit between a student or worker and the system they are trying to navigate.
The agent practices that will hold up in this environment are not the ones built on volume, commission pressure, or proximity to the grey edges of the market. They are the ones built on client outcomes, documented compliance, and a clear account of the value the agent actually provides.
That is not a comfortable message for a sector that spent the better part of a decade growing on the back of a favourable policy environment. But the policy environment has moved, and three stories published in two weeks tell you which direction it is moving in.
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