Industries

How can schools and training providers check applicant contact details?

Check the email domain, the phone number and the connecting IP on each inquiry and application form. Admissions and enrollment teams get a quick read on which entries have usable contact details before staff spend time following up.

The problem

Inquiry forms bring in a mix of real prospects, typos and throwaway entries. Admissions staff work through them one by one, and a bad number or an address on a domain that receives no mail only shows up after a message bounces or a call goes nowhere.

Many applicants use a school or personal address, and many forms come from shared networks such as campus Wi-Fi or a mobile carrier. A team needs facts, not a rule that rejects entries, so it can decide how much follow up each one deserves.

Small admissions offices do not have an engineer for this. A single lookup per field that returns a stable shape can sit behind a web form and give staff a short note on each entry.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that about 19.0 million students attended colleges and universities, including non-degree-granting institutions, in fall 2022. Fall 2022. National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts: Enrollment, read 2026-10-18.

What LookValid does for this

LookValid products for Education
Check	What it gives you	Credits
Check the domain on every inquiry	Returns MX records, SPF and DMARC and flags disposable domains, free providers and role mailboxes. It reads the domain only and cannot confirm that a student mailbox exists.	1 credit per address checked
Store numbers in one format	Parses the number against its country numbering plan and returns E.164, national and international formats plus the number type the plan assigns. Useful for international applicants, since the country is detected for you.	1 credit per valid number
Help staff dial across countries	Give a calling code or country name and get the dialing prefixes, national number lengths and example numbers, so staff calling international applicants dial correctly.	1 credit per lookup (an unknown code, country or name is free)
Look up a partner organization domain	For employer partners and referral sources, returns registration and expiry dates and the registrar from the public RDAP service.	2 credits per registered domain (unregistered domains are free)

A real request and response

This request looks up a calling code the way a staff member would before phoning an applicant abroad. The response lists the regions that share it and how numbers are written there.

POST /v1/country-code

1{
2  "query": "+44"
3}

Response, captured 2026-10-18

1{
2  "found": true,
3  "data": {
4    "kind": "calling_code",
5    "calling_code": "44",
6    "non_geographic": false,
7    "shared": true,
8    "main_region": "GB",
9    "regions": [
10      {
11        "region": "GB",
12        "name": "United Kingdom",
13        "region_leading_digits_pattern": null
14      },
15      {
16        "region": "GG",
17        "name": "Guernsey",
18        "region_leading_digits_pattern": null
19      },
20      {
21        "region": "IM",
22        "name": "Isle of Man",
23        "region_leading_digits_pattern": "74576|(?:16|7[56])24"
24      },
25      {
26        "region": "JE",
27        "name": "Jersey",
28        "region_leading_digits_pattern": null
29      }
30    ],
31    "numbering": null,
32    "notes": "Several regions share this calling code and are told apart by their number patterns, not by the code. main_region is the metadata default where shared formats are stored, not a political ranking."
33  }
34}

This is one real run of Country Calling Codes against a fixed public input, captured 2026-10-18. Sources: Google libphonenumber metadata (Apache-2.0) via libphonenumber-js 1.13.15 (MIT); Country names from Unicode CLDR through Intl.DisplayNames (Unicode License 3.0).

Questions

Can LookValid confirm that an applicant is a real student?

No. It checks facts about a phone number format and an email domain from public data. It does not verify who an applicant is or whether they attend a school.

Does it read student records?

No. Each request sends only the single value you choose to check, such as one email address or one phone number, and returns facts drawn from public data about that value.

How do I handle applicants who write to us from a free email provider?

The email check flags free providers as a fact. Many real applicants use them, so use the flag to decide what follow up an entry gets, not as a reason to turn it away.

Sources

National Center for Education Statistics, Fast Facts: Enrollment https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372, read 2026-10-18

LookValid is run by Meralume Labs. It is not connected to, endorsed by or a partner of any company or product named on this page, and every product name belongs to its owner.

LookValid bills every lookup in credits from one shared balance, so one key covers each check on this page.

See Email Domain Check