For those looking for a chance to study in Finland, nothing is more appealing than a free-tuition vocational program. Understanding this, many agencies favorably introduce such programs to Vietnamese students. Some agencies have partnership agreements with schools in Finland; while others do not seem to have one (but still advertise that they do). Importantly, students are unlikely to verify such business relationship.

Whether there is an official partnership or not is not very important in this case. The secret to this business model is the combination of two factors: “ambiguity of  available slots” and “applicant volume”. When a student makes his/her first payment for admission service, they have to pay a considerable amount of money without knowing about the available study slots and how competitive it is to secure a slot. Therefore, after assembled a large number of candidates to apply, these education agencies can make a lot of money early on.

Take a specific example, a vocational school in eastern Finland plans to recruit 20 students for a culinary class, taught in English. Their targeted student population are international citizens currently in nearby towns/cities. However, since the school knows it is not easy to have enough students, it needs to recruit at least 5 international students from other regions (in Finland or from any country) to make it 20. The news about this 5-slots for international students received by education agencies, and they start advertising. The story begins…

The problem is, there are only 5 available slots, but up to a few dozen agents has participated in advertising, attracting students across South-East Asia. For example, in Vietnam, if there are 5 agencies playing this game, and each agency attracts 20 candidates, there will be 100 applications. At the same time, if there are 3 countries in South-East Asia participating in this campaign with a similar rate, the odds are at least 1/60. Again, it is necessary to emphasize that those agencies do not usually reveal the actual number of slots, and thus the candidates often have no idea how hard it is to win a study slot.

As for the local education agency, assuming each student must pay a service fee of 1,000 USD when submitting their application (often non-refundable), the company can make around 20,000 USD for 20 candidates. Not much effort to spend, not much care for exam results, they still collect a large sum of money in advance.

In fact, some admission agents can use tricks to lure candidates into paying a lot of money. They promise a lot, especially advertising their service as an immigration service. As far as we know, some students in Vietnam could pay up to 10,000 USD for a successful case.

This shady “admission lottery” is still happening and it is unknown when it will be exposed.