There is a question that costs Bangladeshi families more money than any other, and almost nobody asks it in the right order. It is not "is this university real?" It is "is this programme accredited, and does the destination government recognise this institution for a student visa?" Those are two separate checks against two separate registers, and a place can pass the first and fail the second.
Check the destination's own government register before you pay anyone anything. For the UK it is the Home Office Register of licensed student sponsors; for Malaysia the Malaysian Qualifications Register; for Cyprus CYQAA at dipae.ac.cy; for Malta the MFHEA; for Italy Universitaly. Then check the programme separately — accreditation of an institution does not accredit every course it sells. Every one of these registers is free and public.
Why is one check never enough?
Because accreditation is granted at two levels and the market talks about only one. A university can be a fully recognised institution while a particular programme inside it is not accredited — often a new course, a franchised course, or one delivered at a partner campus. The brochure says "accredited university", which is true, and the degree you actually enrol in is not covered.
Malaysia makes this explicit and is a good model for how to think about it everywhere: the Malaysian Qualifications Register is searchable by institution and by programme, and you are meant to check both. Do the same wherever you are going, even where the register does not force you to.
Which register do you check, country by country?
| Country | Register | Where |
|---|---|---|
| UK | Licensed student sponsors | gov.uk |
| Malaysia | MQR | mqa.gov.my |
| Cyprus | CYQAA | dipae.ac.cy |
| Malta | MFHEA | mfhea.mt |
| Italy | Universitaly | universitaly.it |
| Qualification check | UK ENIC | enic.org.uk |
Agents sometimes show a UKRLP listing as proof that a UK institution is legitimate. The UK Register of Learning Providers is a reference-numbering system, not an accreditation or quality-assurance body — appearing on it says almost nothing about the quality of a provider and nothing at all about whether it can sponsor your visa. The register that decides whether a UK institution can issue you a CAS is the Home Office's Register of licensed sponsors: students, published on GOV.UK. If the name is not on that list, no CAS, no visa, whatever else the provider is listed on. We checked the register was live on 29 September 2026.
What if you are going somewhere without a Dhaka mission?
This is where a lot of Bangladeshi files quietly break, and it has nothing to do with the university. Aggregator sites invent embassies. We have verified, on government domains, that Dhaka missions genuinely exist and are government-published for Algeria, Argentina, the Philippines, Malaysia and Türkiye — and that claimed missions for Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Egypt, Malta and the Czech Republic are either fake or unverifiable on any government source.
Where there is no mission in Bangladesh, the file is usually handled from New Delhi — which is a real problem, not a formality. A Bangladeshi applicant may need an Indian visa first, which is a second application, a second timeline and a second refusal risk nested inside the first. Czechia's own New Delhi mission even gives appointments one to two months ahead so that applicants have time to obtain an Indian visa to travel. Ask where your application will physically be decided before you pay a deposit.
What about a degree you plan to use back in Bangladesh?
Recognition abroad and recognition at home are different questions, and for some fields the home-side gate is the harder one.
For most subjects, the University Grants Commission handles equivalence of foreign degrees coming into Bangladesh. For medicine it is much stricter. The BMDC Eligibility Certificate requirement list demands the Bangladesh MBBS/BDS admission test admit card AND result sheet, at a fee of Tk 1,000 — so a student who never sat the Bangladeshi admission test has a problem before they leave. The Registration Qualifying Examination form then demands that certificate's serial number, and requires embassy attestation followed by MOFA re-attestation — not an apostille, at a fee of Tk 8,000.
BMDC publishes no processing time and no deadline for the Eligibility Certificate, so "get it before you leave" is prudent inference on our part rather than a rule we can quote. But the sequence is not optional, and it is the single most common reason a Bangladeshi MBBS abroad turns into a degree that cannot be practised at home.
What are the red flags?
- "No service charge" or "free processing." Nobody works for nothing; find out where the money actually comes from.
- A guaranteed visa. No consultancy anywhere can guarantee a decision made by a foreign government.
- An offer before your documents have been read. An admission letter that arrives within hours of a first phone call was not an assessment.
- Payment to a personal account, or in cash with no receipt naming the institution.
- An institution that appears on no government register of the destination country, only on its own website and directory listings.
- Pressure on a deadline you cannot verify on the university's own or the government's own page.
- Vague answers about where the visa file is decided — Dhaka, New Delhi, or somewhere else entirely.
How do you actually run the check?
If you want to know how a foreign qualification compares to a British one — useful when a programme's name is unfamiliar, or when a "diploma" is being sold as equivalent to a degree — UK ENIC at enic.org.uk is the UK's national agency for the recognition and comparison of international qualifications. It is a paid service for a formal statement, but its existence is the answer to "is this actually a degree?" A programme nobody can map to a recognised level is a programme worth walking away from.
The families who lose money are rarely the ones who were reckless. They are the ones who did one check instead of two, or who checked the university and never asked where the visa would be decided. Nothing in this guide costs anything and none of it takes long — which is exactly why it is worth doing before the deposit rather than after. If you want a second pair of eyes on an offer letter, bring it in. We will run the registers with you, on your screen.
Sourcing and limits. The registers named above were checked for reachability on 29 September 2026: GOV.UK's register of licensed student sponsors, the Malaysian Qualifications Register at mqa.gov.my, CYQAA at dipae.ac.cy, Universitaly and UK ENIC all responded normally. mfhea.mt returned a Cloudflare block to our request on that date and we could not load it — that is an access problem at our end, not a statement about the authority, and Malta's higher-education register remains MFHEA. We quote no fees for any register because none of these pages published one to us. The BMDC figures are from BMDC's own published requirement list and RQE form; BMDC publishes no processing time and no deadline, so the advice to obtain the Eligibility Certificate before departure is our inference. The list of genuine and phantom Dhaka missions reflects our own verification against government domains as at 28 September 2026 and should be re-checked for any country before acting. Registers change; always search the live register rather than relying on a list in any article, including this one.
Official sources: GOV.UK — Register of licensed sponsors: students · Malaysian Qualifications Register · CYQAA — Cyprus quality assurance agency · UK ENIC
Related guides: Bangladesh document attestation for study abroad · BMDC eligibility certificate for MBBS abroad
Bring us the offer letter before you bring anyone the money.
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