Recruiting Intelligence

Customer demographics are important for many businesses. Education is no exception. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) publishes a must-read report for higher education executives, senior admissions officers and trustees creating mid to long-term strategies for academic institutions.

WICHE’s April policy insights “Demography as Destiny: Policy Considerations in Enrollment Management” provides highlights of the detailed report “Knocking on the College door.” The report’s ideas are not necessarily new or surprising, but they are well documented and graphically presented. Helpful state-by-state analyses are available (here is the example for Ohio).

In the business world, companies measure their influence and success in financial metrics: revenue growth and profits. Add share price and market capitalization as measures for publicly listed companies. The education world is dominated by not-for-profit and public universities as well as a large number of non-profit education-related associations. This Intead Insight looks into two, admittedly crude, measures of influence for the non-profit education world: revenue generated by leading non-profit education associations and social media presence.

In Massachusetts, higher education is a big economic contributor with a rich history and some of the biggest global brands such as Harvard and MIT.

International student enrollment is a long-term investment for any academic institution. Building institutional capabilities, contacts and international brand recognition requires a multi-year approach and investment. Industry benchmarks and comparative data can let us know which institutions have been successful in building international enrollment successfully over the years. We used the IIE open door data from 2009 – 2012 for this analysis. For today’s Intead Insight, we focus on the following questions:

We listened with great interest to a one hour webinar by Chris Boehner, Executive Director of Varicant, "Developing a China Strategy" made available by the boarding school organization SSATB (Slides only: click here). Chris presented the complex picture of the current Chinese environment with a rapidly growing middle and wealthy upper class. During the last four years, Chinese students at U.S. private schools have more than quadrupled. This growth trend is supported by the size of the population and the strong wealth creation in China. Today, China has a group of one million millionaires with a relatively young average age of 39. This wealth group is growing rapidly. A very large majority (85%) express an interest in sending their children out of the country for their education. And 30% of those families express an interest in sending their children to the U.S. for that education. And then there is this: 65% of those U.S. bound families want that foreign education to start with a U.S. private boarding school. When you do the simple "back of the napkin" calculation (see Graph 1) you get the future potential of 170,000 additional international K-12 students from China's wealthy economic upper class. Today, there are roughly 24,000 Chinese private boarding school students in the U.S. So we are looking at a growth factor of 7x (see Graph 2). Oh, and Vericant notes that China is adding 61,000 new millionaires every year (6% growth rate). This pool would not include families with more modest means who often pool resources, sell apartments and liquidate savings to fund their child's education. Given the history of the past several years, Vericant's predictions seem to be more than wishful thinking. Their data suggests a very real international student enrollment pool. And, for the most part, those international students will have excellent English skills and will have adjusted to the American culture having studied at U.S. private high schools.