Notes for owners · Industry playbooks
What to tell families honestly about studying MBBS abroad
Give the family the whole cost in writing, say plainly what nobody can guarantee about recognition and licensing, and send them to the official source and their own adviser.
The GullySales team · Updated 3 Oct 2026 · 9 min read
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Tell a family four things before you take a rupee. The whole cost of the degree, not the tuition. That recognition, the screening examination and the right to practise are decided by authorities whose requirements differ by country and change from time to time. That nobody, including you, can guarantee a seat, a pass or a licence. And where they should go to check all of it themselves. A consultant who says that first is slower to close and much harder to replace.
Start with the total cost, written down
The number that breaks families is never the tuition. It is everything around it, discovered one instalment at a time over five or six years.
| Head of cost | What belongs in it | Who confirms the figure |
|---|---|---|
| Tuition | The university's published fee for the whole course | The university, in writing, dated |
| Living | Hostel or rent, food, heating, local transport | Current students and their families |
| Travel | Flights each year, visas, airport transfers | A travel agent, not a guess |
| Insurance and medicals | Health cover, tests, registration charges | The university and the insurer |
| Preparation | Coaching for the screening examination at the end | Whoever runs that coaching |
| The unplanned | A year repeated, a trip home, a currency swing | Nobody, which is the point of saying it |
Hand that sheet over filled in, with the sources named and the date on it. Say that the rupee figure will move with the exchange rate. A parent who can take that page home and show it to the family makes the decision with you instead of around you.
Say exactly what nobody can promise
This is the part the trade gets wrong, and it is the part that causes real harm.
Recognition of a foreign medical qualification, the screening examination required of graduates returning to India, internship requirements and the right to practise in the country of study are all set by authorities, not by consultants or universities. Those requirements are not the same everywhere and they have been changed before. Treat anything you say about them as a statement of what the authority published and when you read it, never as a settled fact.
So write it as a quotation with a date and a link, tell the family to confirm the current position themselves before paying anyone, and suggest they take independent advice from their own counsel on any loan, mortgage or undertaking. A page on your site headed what we will never promise does more for enrolments than any brochure, because every family in this market has heard a guarantee from someone and half of them already suspect it.
The questions a frightened parent actually asks
Not recognition. That comes from the internet. In the room, a mother asks what the food is, whether her son will be the only one from his state, how cold it gets, who he rings at two in the morning, what the language of teaching is in the hospital wards as opposed to the classroom, and what happens if he fails a year.
Answer each one specifically or say you do not know and will find out. For example, a consultancy in Hubballi sending students to one country, with eleven families on its list from the previous season. The details are illustrative. Its strongest asset is the number of one of those students, willing to take a call from a worried mother on a Sunday. Nothing printed competes with that call.
Alumni families are your proof, and they must speak freely
Ask the families whose children went to talk to the ones deciding, with no script. Let them mention the cold, the homesickness and the month the hostel food was terrible. A testimonial with a complaint in it is believed. One without is skipped.
Get their permission in writing for anything you publish, and keep it current. If a family later asks you to take their story down, take it down the same day. This trade runs on word of mouth in a small number of towns, and a family that feels used will say so where it is heard. The wider picture is on our page for MBBS abroad consultants.
The season after the result is an operations problem
When results come out the phone does not stop, and the families you cannot reach go elsewhere within days. Decide beforehand who answers, how a counselling slot gets booked, and where every enquiry is written down with the student's score, the budget and the countries discussed.
Then follow each one through with the written summary and the cost sheet. The consultancies that lose the season are rarely the ones with a weak offer. They are the ones where forty families rang in one week and nobody kept a list.
What to do next
- Build the cost sheet as a template and fill one in for every family you counsel.
- Write the what we will never promise page and put it where a parent will find it.
- Date every claim about recognition or examinations, and name the source.
- Keep a written record of each counselling session and send it to the family the same evening.
- Ask three alumni families for permission to be contacted, and thank them properly.
- Decide who answers the phone in result season.
Do not buy enquiry lists in this market, and do not run advertisements that imply a guaranteed seat. Both bring families you will have to disappoint. If you want the season's enquiries and follow-up examined before the next result comes out, the free audit is the place to start.