Halloween Lessons for International Enrollment Leaders

Intead’s HQ is in Salem, Massachusetts, a city that has built an identity around the Salem Witch Trials, one of the most infamous episodes in American history. Our office sits just a few blocks from where the trials unfolded. A plaque outside our very building marks the site of the Old Witch Gaol (jail), where many of the accused were imprisoned in 1692.

Somewhere over the intervening three centuries, Salem became America’s unofficial Halloween capital. Every October (in fact, throughout the entire year), we’re flooded with costumed visitors from fairies to ghouls. They seek haunted houses, mediums, and the filming locations from Disney’s Hocus Pocus.

For visitors, Salem is primarily a place to spend a pretty great getaway, immersed in one of the few traditions that invites everyone to be exactly who they want to be, if for a limited time. Home to the very first museum in the country documenting early trade between the US and China, among other marvels, Salem's historical and maritime museums are spectacular.

For those of us who work and live here, our city is just another beautiful spot on Boston’s North Shore, with brick streets, historic houses, and many, many New Age bookshops and crystal proprietors.

After a while, the costumed spectacles fade into the background. The ghost tours and tourist groups become something we walk around on our way to lunch, and the people dressed as ghouls and princesses become just another, if mildly disorienting, part of the morning commute.

Life has a way of evening out, even when the environment around us feels unusually theatrical. The metaphor of dramatic spookiness seems apropos. We’re here to help you move forward with planning and execution, despite the drama all around us in our field.

For years, international enrollment has approached uncertainty as though it were a passing condition; something to navigate before the next period of stability arrived. The past several recruitment cycles suggest a different reality.

Uncertainty is no longer interrupting the work of international enrollment management but becoming a consistent element of the operating environment itself. The more useful question is no longer when things will settle down, but how institutions can continue making good decisions while they don’t.

Read on for a helpful Start, Stop, Continue approach to managing today’s international enrollment environment.

From Understanding the Policy to Operating Within It

For much of the past several years, the international enrollment sector has been learning the same lesson Salem teaches its longtime residents and other non-Halloween-economy workers, as our sector continues to operate in a near-continuous state of, frankly, excessive adjustment.

The past few years have delivered one gut punch after another, from visa backlogs and travel restrictions to policy reversals that gave institutions little time to prepare, forcing international enrollment teams to build and rebuild strategies around market conditions that could shift without notice. It is hardly surprising that our sector has developed a reflex for reacting quickly and reconsidering everything. Honestly, that reflex is fair. Some of this is scary. But a good reflex for surviving uncertainty is not necessarily a good strategy for operating within it with a long-term vision.

The conversation surrounding the proposed end to Duration of Status (DS) for international students has appropriately centered on understanding the policy and its implications. Before institutions adjusted recruitment strategies or operational practices, they first needed confidence that they understood the regulation itself, how it was likely to be implemented, and the level of anxiety it may produce for international students (much less the anxiety created for university administrators).

And then, on September 14, one day before the new rule was scheduled to take effect, a federal judge blocked it. For now, the current DS policy remains in place. What happens next remains to be seen. If there were ever an illustration of the operating environment international enrollment leaders now inhabit, this is a pretty good one. Or you could look at the shifting policies on CPT (Curricular Practical Training). There are simply too many examples these days.

A primary question our industry must ask: How do institutions recruit successfully in the world we have, rather than the one we wish we had?

Recruiting in the World We Have

Whether a policy ultimately moves from proposal to reality or is blocked along the way, the responsibility of international enrollment leaders extends beyond following the debate itself. Advocacy remains important, but so is the work of translating policy into institutional practice and student counseling. Recruitment cycles continue, students continue making decisions, and institutions remain responsible for meeting the enrollment and student support goals they established long before the latest policy debate began. OPT rule changes anyone?

So many of these recent policy changes have not withstood the legal challenges that follow. But even when a policy never takes effect (like Duration of Status), the outgoing message to international students can be daunting, creating confusion and fear.

Our work shifts from interpretation to execution. They are related exercises, but they require different instincts. One asks whether a regulation is well-designed. The other asks how an institution should operate while its regulatory environment remains unsettled.

International student source countries that consistently produce students who enroll, persist, and then graduate remain strong markets. Institutions that understand precisely which students thrive on their campuses remain better positioned than those pursuing application volume without sufficient attention to fit. Duration of Status policies may change again, but they do not eliminate the fundamentals of our field.

If You’re Choosing a Character This Halloween…

Around Salem, the most interesting question to ask oneself isn’t: why are there so many Stormtroopers everywhere? It’s who you’ll choose to be in a city where you can be anyone.

If our colleagues in international enrollment management are putting on a costume this October, consider these three before you decide:

START

Start the season as Superwoman. Start by bringing the student academic advising up front.

The proposed end of the current Duration of Status policy put a much brighter spotlight on questions of program length, realistic completion timelines, and extension planning. The rule may now be blocked, but those conversations do not suddenly become irrelevant. They belong much earlier in the student conversation than they once did. The institutions that treat advising as something that begins during recruitment, rather than after orientation, will spend less time solving preventable problems three years from now.

STOP

Retire the siren costume. Nearly every enrollment office has recruitment trips that survive because they’ve become tradition rather than strategy. Some happen in spectacular destinations, with beachfront hotels, generous hospitality, and conference agendas that make it easy to say yes.

But recruitment isn’t tourism, and this is not the year to let an attractive itinerary substitute for market intelligence. If your strongest source markets are in Bogotá, Ho Chi Minh City, or São Paulo, that’s where your recruitment budget belongs, not wherever the invitation happened to arrive and you know that the beachfront drinks go down easy.

CONTINUE

Keep dressing as Casper. The friendly ghost never needed much reinvention. Continue being the international enrollment office that answers email and WhatsApp messages quickly; who streamlines their admissions processes; who tells students the truth instead of what they hope to hear, and who understands that India is not one market but many. Be the leader who diversifies your source countries while recognizing that China and India continue to account for the lion’s share of students coming to the US, despite the headlines. The international student recruitment policy environment keeps changing. Good recruitment practices and student mobility analysis have not. Friendly, smart, and ever-present are success characteristics.

The Character Energy This Moment Requires

If the Duration of Status debate has demonstrated anything, it is that international enrollment leaders cannot know which proposed policy will take effect, which will be blocked, which will return in another form, or how long any of those answers will remain settled. CPT changes have arrived, and OPT challenges are next. Another regulation, another geopolitical shift, another market disruption, or a new combination of the three will eventually take its place.

The institutions able to navigate those moments most successfully will not be the ones that predict every change correctly. Rather, they’ll be the ones that know which character to play when the environment changes: proactive and adaptive rather than reactive or receding, intentional rather than habitual, and wise enough to recognize that changing tactics does not require changing principles.

The Intead team is here to help. We’ll work behind the scenes and support your institution’s main character energy. We’re just an email away.