Checking a university's status before you enrol is the cheapest step in this whole process and the one with the most leverage. A few minutes in front of an official service can save four years and non-refundable fees.
This guide explains how to check, and — just as important — what the check does not cover.
The official tool
The Ministry of Education provides a university inquiry service, searchable by institution name and country.
That is the correct authority. What a broker, a forum or an agency website publishes is not a substitute for it, however reassuring it sounds.
We also publish a searchable copy of the register — 3,380 institutions across 76 countries, with the status of each and a direct link to its official record. Use it to find your institution quickly; use the ministry's own record as the binding answer.
A checklist before you enrol
The university. Search it by full official name and by country. European university names resemble one another, and a campus in another city can be a legally different entity.
The programme. Here is the distinction most people miss: the inquiry covers the institution, while equivalency is decided at the level of the programme. Ask the university in writing for the official programme name and the type of award granted.
The mode of study. Confirm in writing that the programme is full-time — not distance, not blended. This is a condition with no exception.
Duration and credit hours. Ask for a statement of total credit hours: some European programmes run three years. The detail of this condition and the rest of the equivalency requirements are in the full equivalency guide.
Language and admission. Keep your admission letter and your language-test result — IELTS or otherwise — in your file from day one.
Check in minutes whether you can practice in your destination country.
Why the university's name is not enough
The ministry warns on its own equivalency service page that a university appearing in the search results does not necessarily mean every degree from it will be equivalated.
Read that carefully, because it is the difference between a safe four years and a wasted four years. The recommendation attaches to the institution. The decision attaches to the programme, the mode of study and the student's own circumstances.
There is a second layer that the searchable register makes visible and a plain name lookup does not: many institutional records carry their own notes and cautions. A university can show as not suspended and still have written conditions attached to studying there — restrictions on programmes taught in a particular language, or on programmes designed for international students. Those are conditions the ministry places on the student, not a judgement on the university, and they change as the record changes.
The ministry also cautions that the status shown for an institution does not remove the need to open its record: inside it, each specialisation and each academic degree carries its own status. A university whose overall status is "not suspended" can have specific specialisations suspended or closed.
So: read the full official record before you enrol, not just the university's name.
What the statuses mean
The register shows a status for each institution. These are the ministry's own labels:
- Not suspended — the large majority of the register.
- Suspended for labour-market saturation — a suspension tied to the job market, not to the quality of the university.
- Partially suspended — the ministry defines this as an institution where some specialisations or degrees are suspended and others are not.
- Closed.
If your university does not appear
Check the spelling in English first: 3,088 of the 3,380 institutions in the register are recorded in Latin script, not Arabic. Try the full official name, or search by country and browse the list.
If it still does not appear, go to the ministry's portal directly, and do not treat its absence from any third-party copy — ours included — as a final answer.
The order that saves money
- 1Check the institution
in the inquiry service.
- 2Open its full record
and read the notes and the status of your specialisation.
- 3Ask the university in writing
for the official programme name, the mode of study and the credit hours.
- 4Keep everything
from the admission letter onwards.
- 5Only then enrol.
Every one of those steps costs minutes. Skipping them costs years.
Create your free profile and we will verify your degree with the awarding institution itself. The Ministry of Education decides equivalency; our part is that your file reaches it complete and documented.