Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom each keep a list of institutions that are separately licensed to enrol international students. An institution can be a real, accredited university and still not be on it, and a student who enrols outside the list does not get a visa. Those lists are what this site archives.
Most countries do not have one. We checked more than twenty jurisdictions against their live official resources. In most of them the question has no register to answer it, because being a recognised institution is the eligibility test. That is not a gap in our coverage. It is the answer, and as far as we can find, nobody else has written it down.
Two questions that look like one
Is this a real institution whose qualification counts? Nearly every country answers this, through an accreditation or recognition register, and many publish it as open data.
If a foreign student enrols here, will a visa be issued? Far fewer countries answer this separately. Where they do, the answer is a distinct, revocable, published status held by the institution, and losing it strands enrolled students.
Conflating the two would be easy and wrong. A register of accredited institutions tells you nothing about immigration eligibility in a country that gates study at the institution, and in a country that does not gate it there, the accreditation register is the only list there is. Every row below says which of the two it is.
Countries that gate international study at the institution
Eleven, on our count. The column that matters most is the last one: whether anyone keeps the superseded editions. In every case but one, the answer is that the publisher keeps only today.
| Country | The register | Who decides | Published as | Superseded editions kept by the publisher |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | CRICOS | Department of Education | Open data | No |
| Canada | Designated Learning Institution list | IRCC | Web list | No |
| United Kingdom | Register of licensed student sponsors | Home Office | Downloadable file | No |
| United States | SEVP certified school list | ICE, Department of Homeland Security | A dated PDF, published weekly | No, and it is not linked from anywhere |
| Japan | Institutions listed in the student residence notice | Immigration Services Agency | PDF, replaced in place | No, though each amendment appears in the Official Gazette |
| Netherlands | Public register of recognised sponsors for study | IND | Web tables, updated monthly | No |
| Ireland | Interim List of Eligible Programmes, being replaced by the TrustEd Ireland mark | Department of Justice, and QQI | Spreadsheet | Unclear; earlier editions could not be retrieved |
| Singapore | EduTrust certification | Committee for Private Education | Web listing | No |
| New Zealand | Signatories to the Pastoral Care Code | NZQA | A search filter only. The status does not appear on the institution record. | No |
| South Korea | Education Internationalization Quality Certification | Ministry of Education | Web list and an annual announcement | No |
| Malaysia | Approval by Education Malaysia Global Services | EMGS | Not published | Not applicable |
Two of these deserve to be read twice.
Malaysia does not publish its list at all. An institution must be approved by EMGS before it can obtain a visa approval letter, and there is no public register of which institutions are approved. A prospective student cannot check.
South Korea publishes a third of its own register. Certification is tiered, and the tiers drive how strictly a visa is screened. The 2026 announcement states that the general and consulting tiers are not disclosed. Only the certified tier is named.
Countries where nothing separate is published
In these, a student visa turns on admission to an institution that is already recognised under national law. There is no second list, so there is nothing to be removed from, and no register of this kind to archive.
Continental Europe, broadly. Under the EU students and researchers directive the gate is the admission letter from a recognised institution, and recognition is decided by the education ministry. Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland all work this way. Several publish excellent open data about which institutions are recognised. None of it answers the immigration question, because in those countries the immigration question is not asked of the institution.
China. The Ministry of Education publishes a national list of higher education institutions, and authority to admit international students is broadly delegated to the institutions themselves. There is no general register of which may enrol them. The only institution-specific list we found is bound to a single programme: the universities commissioned to teach clinical medicine in English.
India. Recognition is published by the UGC as consolidated PDFs. The Study in India portal registers students and issues them an identifier for the visa application; it does not publish a register of eligible institutions.
United Arab Emirates. A student residence visa is sponsored by the institution or the free zone, and any licensed institution can sponsor. The licensing register is the eligibility test.
What this register holds today
Four of the eleven, and the numbers below are read from our own data when this page loads, not typed into it.
| Register | Dated editions held | Recording since | Latest edition | Changes recorded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia, CRICOS | 58 | 2021 | 2026 | 43,057 |
| Canada, DLI | 366 | 2018 | 2026 | 1,901 |
| Japan, MEXT | 3 | 2026 | 2026 | 0 |
| United Kingdom, student sponsors | 8 | 2026 | 2026 | 13 |
| Total | 435 | 44,971 |
The Canadian register is held as a statistics layer only. Its licence does not permit us to republish institution names, so we publish the counts and the shape of the change instead, and say so rather than quietly dropping the country.
The Japanese register is the thinnest thing on this site, and it is also pointed at the wrong list: we hold a Ministry of Education list, while the register that actually governs a student visa is published by the Immigration Services Agency. That is a known defect, stated here rather than hidden.
How this page was made
Every jurisdiction was checked against the live resources of the authority itself on 7 September 2026, not against a directory or a summary. For each we asked three things: is the register published in a form a machine can read; can approved institutions be identified by a real field rather than by matching names; and does the licence permit a site like this one to keep a copy and attribute it.
Where an authority states something in writing, we take the statement rather than the inference. Where we could not reach a resource, the row says so instead of guessing. Two jurisdictions in this survey could not be verified from our side and are recorded as unverified rather than as absent.
We did not count a register of accredited institutions as an answer to the immigration question, in either direction. That distinction is the whole point of the page, and blurring it would make the page useless.
Why this is worth writing down
A student comparing destinations is told, everywhere, to check that an institution is recognised. In four countries that advice is incomplete, because recognition and permission to enrol a foreign student are different statuses and an institution can hold one without the other. In most of the world the advice is right but for a reason nobody explains: there is only one list because there is only one gate.
The practical consequence is narrow and real. If you are going to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand or South Korea, there is a second thing to check, and it can be withdrawn from an institution while you are enrolled. If you are going to Germany or France or China, there is not.
Corrections
This page records what authorities published on the date given. Registers move, and two of the sources in an earlier survey of ours had moved or been withdrawn by the time we rechecked them. If something here is wrong, or a country has introduced a register we have missed, tell us and we will correct it and date the correction.