CRICOS Experts / Recruitment

You are answerable for what agents say

In a language you may not speak, in a country you are not in.

Education agents perform a genuine function: they reach students a provider could not, explain an unfamiliar system, and handle a process that is daunting from the other side of the world. Good agents are valuable and the relationship is legitimate. The difficulty is structural rather than moral, and it is that the agent is paid on enrolment.

That incentive is not resolved by a clause in an agreement. It is managed by monitoring what actually happens: how students recruited through each agent perform, how many withdraw early, what they understood about the course before arriving, and whether their expectations match what they were sold.

The data required is already held. Completion, progression and withdrawal by agent is a report most student systems can produce, and the variation between agents is usually large and informative. An agent whose students consistently withdraw in the first term is telling you something about what is being said.

The other check is direct and rarely done: asking arriving students what they were told about the course, the cost, the work rights and the outcome. Discrepancies surface immediately and they are far easier to address in week one than after a complaint.

There is a further check on agent conduct that costs nothing and is rarely done, which is looking at what agents publish. Agent websites and social channels frequently carry claims about a provider's courses, outcomes and migration consequences that the provider has never seen and would not endorse, and a periodic search for your own institution's name finds them.