Sammendrag
Organisations and individuals that recruit international students and guide them in their applications to foreign Higher Education Institutions are subject to significant attention from the sector, media and scholars in the UK, US and Australia. International students who want to partake of Higher Education outside of their home country are faced with less information and more challenges, when preparing to study abroad, than they would if they were to study in their native contexts. On the other side of the equation, information about institutions, advice regarding applications, and information about visas and other challenges faced by international students, varies across foreign institutions. If the information is lacking or the process perceived as complicated, students might choose to use a third party’s help in order to obtain information and facilitate their application. Sometimes a third party can be a school counsellor, a friend or a family member willing to guide a prospective international student with their application process. But a significant segment of third parties involved in an international students’ application process are profit motivated individual or organisations that offer application advice as a commercial service, these are commonly known in the sector as “agents” or “agencies”. Some of these agents are regulated, working directly with institutions under a contractual agreement, but there is an increasing number of unregulated agents that work independently and un-coupled to the institutions. This thesis will focus on unregulated agents currently recruiting Nepalese students towards Norwegian institutions. It will explore their operations, and analyse Norwegian Higher Education Institutions’ practice towards unregulated agents.