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AED 365,000 for a dentistry degree at an institution with no education permit: the Dubai "universities" that only needed you to be 17 and able to pay
Free zones are built to make it easy to open a business. In Dubai, that ease was used to open medical schools.
Gulf News reported in September 2018 on three institutions that Dubai's Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) had shut: the Universal Empire Institute of Medical Sciences, an entity styling itself "Mahatma Gandhi University", and the International Institute for Management and Technology. According to the report, they held commercial licences from free-zone authorities — permission to trade — but never obtained the KHDA's Educational Services Permit; one relocated to another emirate before completing the quality-assurance process. Admission requirements were, in the paper's words, that a student be 17 years old and able to show they could pay. No academic criteria applied. The programmes on offer were mainly medicine and dentistry. One student, named in the report, had paid about AED 365,000 towards a six-year dentistry programme that was never completed. The report linked the operations to an Indian businessman, Sudhir Gopi, operating through a holding company, who had been deported from the UAE in 2010; he is entitled to the presumption of innocence.
The mechanism is a licence-type substitution, and it is common wherever governments separate the right to run a company from the right to run a school. A trade licence, a free-zone address and a glass-fronted office look like an institution. The document that would prove otherwise — an education permit or accreditation from the emirate's or the federal education regulator — is a specific thing that a family does not know to ask for, and an agent is paid not to mention.
The Gulf is a large and legitimate destination for medical study, with universities licensed by the UAE Ministry of Higher Education and by emirate-level regulators such as the KHDA and Abu Dhabi's ADEK, and their programmes are listed by those regulators and in the World Directory of Medical Schools. The checks, then, are exact: is the institution licensed by the education regulator (not the free zone), is the specific medicine or dentistry programme accredited by the UAE's Commission for Academic Accreditation, and does your own country's medical council recognise it? An institution that answers with a commercial licence is answering a different question.
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This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.