Fees collected but never remitted, tourist visas sold as student visas: why the Indian embassy in Manila told students to pay universities directly

The Philippines is one of the largest destinations for Indian medical students — English-medium, US-pattern MD programmes, a large Indian community — and its agent economy has been an official concern for years. In September 2017, The Hans India reported an advisory from the Embassy of India in Manila that reads like a catalogue of this site's scam patterns.

The embassy's core finding was that most complaints it received from Indian students in BS/MD programmes concerned agents, and specifically the gap between what was promised in India and what students found on arrival. The named practices: agents collecting admission and tuition fees and failing to deposit them with the university, leaving students in arrears with institutions that believed they had not paid; false promises about the National Medical Admission Test, with some agents telling families that a 40% score would do when the programmes in question required 80–90%; students issued tourist visas instead of student visas and then charged again to "convert" them; and, because there was no cap on intake through agents, universities enrolling more students than they could teach and failing large numbers in the pre-medical bachelor's stage. The report put the flow at roughly 2,000 students a year from the Telugu states alone, at around ₹30 lakh each, and noted that institutions including Davao and the University of Perpetual had come under scrutiny from the Philippine Commission on Higher Education (CHED).

The advisory's instructions were equally concrete: enrol only in a college approved by CHED and on the embassy's published list; remit admission and tuition fees directly to the university's bank account, never to an agent; and confirm before enrolling that the curriculum meets India's requirements for a foreign medical degree. The embassy's standing FAQ for medical students carries the same guidance.

Two structural features of the Philippine route deserve attention. The BS-then-MD structure means a student can spend two years and lakhs of rupees on a bachelor's programme before the medical degree even begins, and the pre-medical stage is where over-enrolled institutions fail students. And the country's NMAT threshold is real: an agent who says it can be bypassed is describing either a fraud or an institution that will not lead to a recognised degree.

Everything in the 2017 advisory remains true. Pay the university. Confirm the visa category on the visa itself. Check CHED approval on CHED's website, not on the agent's brochure. And ask the institution, in writing, for its Indian graduates' licensing-exam pass rate — the number that tells you whether the ₹30 lakh buys a career.