Vietnam is becoming one of the hot areas for international student recruitment. With a young population, a rising middle class, and a cultural emphasis on education, many more Vietnamese families are considering education abroad for their children. The US is but one player in this burgeoning education abroad momentum. Click here to listen to a recent podcast with Michael Goldberg, Fulbright scholar who spent six months in Vietnam in 2012.
We've been having a great time this spring at Intead. Not only are we hard at work creating great content for our blogs, Insights, inSession eCourse series and conference presentations, we have also had one of our employees serve as an undercover mystery shopper. If you are unfamiliar with the concept this is a frequently used method in the retail industry to explore how a business operates when secretly examined. We had our employee pose as a prospective undergraduate from China. He sent an email through a QQ account requesting information from 30 institutions in the US, Canada and Australia-- popular destinations for Chinese international students. He asked about admission requirements for Fall 2014 and he requested information in Chinese to share with his parents. We were curious about the response rate from institutions as well as the information they would provide our mystery shopper. The data gleaned from our mystery shopper experiment was quite fascinating.
Millennials are the core "customer group" for undergraduate and graduate programs. For university marketers understanding their target audience is absolutely crucial to reaching and attracting prospective students. Obviously the "education program" is not defined by admissions staff and university marketers, so academic staff has an equal stake in understanding the desires, priorities, likes and dislikes of this generation. Designing a compelling offering with marketing messages that attract and core academic content that delivers on the marketing promise...well, we can all dream of that perfect world. Trying to achieve it is what keeps us employed.
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Universities are looking for future revenue streams. Couldn't universities invest in the future of their students and secure their own future? How would that work?
The internet was a buzz last week due to news that the College Board was cancelling the administration of the May SAT in South Korea. A cheating scandal was unearthed and in an effort to curb widespread cheating (and possibly to punish those involved) the College Board announced that the SAT would not be administered in South Korea in May. There was some debate whether the June test date would be cancelled as well. According to our sources there remains conflicting opinions whether the June test date will be cancelled. As of the publishing of this piece it has not yet formally been cancelled.
The United States continues to be the most desirable study destination within the world (Source: i-graduate). International student enrollment grew by 16.5 percent in the last four years across the United States according to the IIE open door report. The competition among universities for qualified students with sufficient financial means is increasing on a global scale. Canada and Australia recently launched new initiatives to bolster their competitiveness.
During the past couple of weeks we have analyzed international student data for trends showing us which universities have been successful with their international student recruitment activities. See Consider the Competition (Insight 4/10/13) and the blogs onOhio and Massachusetts. One of our readers suggested that we compare trends between universities using independent international recruiting agencies and those using only internal resources for their international enrollment efforts.
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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).
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