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Data from Prodigy Finance shows the majority of students pursuing education abroad, across India, Brazil and Africa, come not from wealthy metros but from small towns, farming families, and first-generation households.
London, August, 2026: Most conversations about studying abroad centre on ambition, prestige, and opportunity. What rarely gets told is who actually carries the heaviest financial risk when that dream is threatened. It is not the wealthy. It is about a student from a smaller town, from a humble background, with a family that has spent years quietly saving for a single shot at a different life.
Since 2007 Prodigy Finance has been serving international students , and nearly two decades of data tells a story that runs counter to what most people assume about those who study abroad. While students from well off families are certainly part of the picture, the overwhelming majority of students funded come from small towns and lower income backgrounds.
Sonal Kapoor, Global Chief Business Officer at Prodigy Finance, says the pattern is unmistakable the moment you actually look at the data. “If you look at our data itself, you will find that students from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities make up nearly 79% of the students we serve. But, this trend is not unique to India. We see the exact same pattern in Brazil and across the Africa region. Most of these students come from a very humble background.”
One story captures this reality with striking clarity. A student whose father is a farmer once told the Prodigy team that going to a traditional bank for a loan was simply not possible, because the only asset his family had was the land they farmed, and by law, agricultural land in India cannot be used as collateral. Farmer income is also tax exempt, which meant he could not even produce the tax returns most lenders required. His entire path to a master’s degree existed only because a lender was willing to look past what his family did not have, and see what he was capable of instead. The same story plays out an ocean away. A student from a small town in southern Brazil, the first in his entire family to ever pursue a degree abroad, went on to work at an investment banking in New York and eventually became Chief of Staff at a major food retail company, a career path he says would have taken ten to fifteen years longer without that first loan.
If you look at the ground reality of what the average farming household in India actually earns, according to ICRIER, the figure sits at roughly INR 19,696 a month, with many earning even less than this. Against that backdrop, funding an international master’s degree is not just ambitious. It borders on impossible, unless someone is willing to lend against a future that has not happened yet, rather than a past that never had the means.
Visa restrictions and currency fluctuations usually hit these students the hardest, precisely because they have the least cushion to absorb any shock. For families with this income, the dream is rarely something big. Sometimes that push comes from just being able to walk into a shop and not look at the price tag first. Or sit down for a meal together without quietly doing the maths in your head. To a middle class or wealthy family, that probably sounds trivial. But for a family that has never had that, it can feel like a completely different life. One they never even let themselves imagine.
For many, studying abroad genuinely delivers that transformation. According to Prodigy Finance’s data, 74% of graduates at least double their salary after their master’s, a figure that climbs to nearly 80% among students from low income countries, with more than half quadrupling it. Ninety percent said they had no other financing option. As Sonal puts it, “Prodigy Finance was built for this. Studying abroad is not just about wealthy students chasing prestige. It is also about a farmer who spent years of savings hoping to make his son an engineer. That dream is exactly what we exist to help.”
