Worldwide student recruitment is a big task. We wonder: how many representatives do you need to be successful? What is the ideal number of internal and external international student recruiters?
First, let's look at two different groups: internal and external recruiters. Internal would be your full-time admissions staff who travel and support international recruitment. We don't see any good benchmarks in that area. Many universities assign international and domestic areas to admissions officers. Other universities with sufficient scale have dedicated international staff. We believe that cultural expertise, contacts and relationships -- let alone language skills - can be better developed with dedicated staff. Yet we realize the need for sufficient scale and investment to support that headcount.
We won't cover in-country representations today since this is still a rare -- if desirable occurrence - and we have written about our views previously in our book 88 Ways to Recruit International Students.
We will focus on third-party placement agents or country representatives, also called commission-based agents. Our research last year for our ebook, Student Counselors and Agents: Building and Managing Your International Nework showed us that there was no clear pattern on how universities develop and determine the size of their network. The factors and questions we found that most frequently influenced the decision include:
- Existence of a dedicated agent manager
- Established process for selecting agents
- Annual or bi-annual review of agent performance
- Legal and/or standards requirements (e.g. state rules, AIRC requirement, etc.)
For this article, we did some counting for you. We visited a few of the universities that follow the best practice of listing their international representatives on their website. In the United States it's a rather small group that clearly lists their authorized agents and reps. We used the University of Cincinnati and the SUNY system. Both are established and professional users of this recruiting channel. In Australia, all universities publicly list their authorized agents and, for the purposes of this blog post, we selected the University of Sydney -- a highly reputable unversity.
See the results for yourself.
On its website the University of Cincinnati lists 75 agencies with 191 agency offices, SUNY lists 129 agencies with 500 agency offices. You note that SUNY must have contracted not only more but also larger recruiting agencies given the jump in offices. This is not surprising if you know about the New York State public procurement process that makes is harder for small international agencies to participate. Lastly, the University of Sydney has 154 agencies listed with almost 600 offices around the world.
It may also be interesting to consider the number of international students at these universities. Cincinnati has roughly 2,900 international students, based on the latest availalbe IIE data and Sydney about 11,000. The SUNY system is challenging to consider since not all campuses use the agent channel.
We also wanted to highlight the geographic distribution of the network. For SUNY and Sydney, about 40% of the offices are based in China and for Cincinnati 30%. Now the pure number of offices do not give us any information on the number of counselors and agents, which we suspect is on average even greater per agent office in China than in most other countries. But it will not be a surprise that China and India dominate the networks due to the size of the markets and the propensity to use agents in support of international enrollment.
Source: Estimates from University websites (May 2014) --- Manual counting and matching of offices may have led to slight errors.
One more group of large scale recruiters should be considered. The language providers, such as ELS, StudyGroup and pathway providers such as Navitas, Kaplan and INTO, all maintain incredibly large agent networks. The publicly available information is limited. Let me quote from a recent article on pathway programs from Inside Highered, "INTO’s chief operating officer for North America, Mary Jane Miller, said the company has a network of 31 regional offices, which in turn have relationships with 900 counselors." You notice the 31 offices with a large number of counselors. On average the INTO recruiting agencies would have 30 counselors. I visited China recently and met with one agent that has 300 counselors in Beijing alone, while another highly reputable agent in Shanghai had four counselors -- so you see the differences in scale.
Lastly, we want to point out that it is very different to estimate the number of agencies and counselors since we are double counting many times. You can be sure that the majority of agents will represent a wide arrange of colleges, language schools and pathway networks.
