The consultancies that mushroomed in the past few years had a great time after the United Kingdom relaxed visa criteria for overseas students in 2009. But everything changed after the UK government stopped accepting new student visa applications from Nepal, Bangladesh and northern India from February 1, citing a sharp and unexpected rise in the number of students aspiring to work rather than study in the UK. [break]
Stricter regulations imposed by Australia and the economic recession in the United States in the past few years had already affected the flow of students but the UK boom had softened the impact.
“Our business has almost come to a standstill now,” General Secretary of Education Consultancy Association of Nepal (ECAN) Rajendra Baral said. He said there are more than 500 consultancies functional in the Valley out of around 1,000 registered with the government.
“Apart from more than 4,000 people working in these consultancies the decline in business has also indirectly affected commercial banks and media houses in terms of student loans and advertising respectively,” Baral added.
Baral disclosed that most students went to the USA in 2006 and 2007 while Australia attracted the largest number in 2008, to be overtaken by the UK in 2009.
Around 10,000 students went to Australia in 2008 but this figure came down to just around 1,000 in 2009. The Ministry of Education (MoE) issued 10,121 No Objection Certificates (NOC) for Australia in fiscal year 2065-66 while just 679 have been issued as of the end of Chaitra [mid- March] in the current fiscal year. Likewise, while 2,934 NOCs were issued for the US in fiscal year 2065-66, this number has come down to just 874 by Chaitra-end this fiscal year.
An education consultant disclosed that Australia became suspicious about the bank loans brought by a large number of Nepali students going there in 2008 and sent a team to Nepal to find out the facts.
They found gross discrepancies in the awarding of loans and Australia then started to acknowledge loans granted by Nabil and SBI banks alone, drastically bringing down the number of Nepali students accepted there in 2009.
Against this grim scenario, the relaxation of criteria by the UK in 2009 came as a huge relief. “We sent around 10,000 students to the UK in 2009 alone,” Baral said.
Far from just providing relief to the consultants, the new UK business generated perhaps the largest amount of revenue for the industry in a single year. Apart from processing charges from students, consultants received anything from 10 to 30 percent commission on the one-year fee of at least 3,000 Pounds Sterling deposited by students at colleges. Many consultancies expanded their size while many new ones came into operation to tap the UK income.
“It was too good to last. So we didn´t increase our staff size, rather we worked overtime with existing staff as long as it lasted,” International Relations Director of the American Education Foundation Rakesh Shrestha said. But he conceded that other institutions, which didn´t act rationally, may have been forced to cut staff.
The number of students going to other countries had already started to shrink and the consultancies were hit hard once the UK bubble burst.
But consultants argue that all is not gloom and doom for the industry, which can go a long way with government intervention.
premdhakal@myrepublica.com
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