That photo and headline were admittedly clickbait. There are certainly turbulent waters ahead, but no abyss from our point of view. We do have some great fiscal perspective to share here. And awesome photo, right? We took that while attending the AIRC Symposium and ICEF North America Workshop in Niagara, Canada.
During the AIRC event, Maggie and Ben gave a truly valuable presentation with a new set of Intead slides focused on a data-driven, actionable approach to budgeting for international enrollment efforts. This session and the slides were extremely well received, especially in the currently ambiguous, post-covid student mobility climate.
Let’s meet in New Orleans @ NAFSA 2024!
Join one of Intead’s two NAFSA presentations:
- ChatGPT and AI: What are the real opportunities for enrollment management?
Wed., May 29 @ 1 p.m.
This one gives you the real-world picture, filtering out all of the smoke and silliness. Featuring David L. Di Maria, Senior International Officer & Associate Vice Provost for International Education at UMBC, and Iliana Joaquin, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Intead
- Groundbreaking Data: International Student Employment After Graduation
Thurs., May 30 @ 11:30 a.m.
This one presents unprecedented data about the value of international students after they graduate. Never before research Intead conducted with support from NAFSA and 12 US institutions offers great opportunities to advocate for your internationalization efforts. Featuring Joanna Regulska, Vice Provost and Dean of Global Affairs, UC Davis and Ben Waxman, Intead CEO
Get ahead with soon-to-be-released data from Intead.
Intead is gearing up to release 3 new proprietary data sets that will change the way your team thinks about international student recruitment in the coming year. Incredibly telling data on international student career aspirations, the companies that hire them, and how the US election figures into international student decisions. More to come at NAFSA 2024. Pre-register to receive the reports as soon as they become available.
For the past 15 years, the Intead team has been watching the numbers and predicting the future of international student enrollment with accuracy. It was February 2020, as the Chinese government shut down travel in and out of Wuhan and Covid had just begun its rampage though Italy that we were quoted in the Boston Globe pointing to the impending global shut down of international student mobility. Not everyone was happy with our saying so. But we weren’t wrong.
Our point: we are willing to be bold and make statements that others have every reason to avoid. Someone’s got to feed our industry sober and helpful intel without all the blather.
So, read on for what we see ahead and will be talking about at the upcoming NAFSA and GMAC conferences. Oh, and to grab our budget planning slides from the AIRC Symposium that will be available here to our blog subscribers for just one week before we move them into our library only available to our Intead Plus subscribers.
Download Our Budgeting for International Enrollment presentation.
Imagine the flow of students around the world as water through a garden hose. The pandemic acted as a heavy-booted foot on that garden hose. For two years, the pressure behind that boot built up and as the boot lifted, a surge of students dashed forward. Young people, with pent-up desire for adventure and opportunity were once again free to travel the world.
Certainly, the flow from some countries was different than others. Due to a variety of factors, the flow of Chinese students has not recovered, while Indian student demand truly surged beyond past levels.
The global student surge has leveled off. And we are sensing a significant leveling off from India, currently the main driver of enrollment growth in the US since the pandemic boot walked away. And now, ambiguity galore with elections coming up in major markets around the world, Germany, Canada, France, UK, Australia, and of course, the US this November. [Note: we'll be addressing our take on global politics at the GMAC conference in New Orleans, June 19-21, 2024.
In each of these elections, immigration and student visas figure prominently. And we’ve been preparing for it by doing research using a variety of proprietary data sets.
At our upcoming conference sessions, we will be giving you all access to unprecedented data and insight on international student careers and how international students feel about studying in the US based on the US election among other factors.
We were first out of the gate in 2016 with groundbreaking data about student sentiment the first time Mr. Trump was the Republican nominee. The New York Times, NPR’s Marketplace, and the Chronicle of Higher Education all reported on our findings.
Our data analysts are hard at work again crunching the numbers on three new proprietary data sets on international student career aspirations, where they earned their degrees, the companies they end up working for when they graduate, how much they make, and a host of other, never before gathered insights.
Are we excited to share the figures? You should see our data analysis team. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and thrilled to get their findings into your hands.
Why this matters…
A surprising set of US institutions stand out as hugely valuable to international student career success. Armed with our data, the case you make to prospective students (your messaging that allows you to stand out from the crowd), can speak directly and powerfully. So many institutions today are talking very loudly about their engineering and business programs. And yet, they do little to nothing to differentiate those academic programs from all the other options prospective students can choose from.
Clearly, marketing is about standing out. Marketing is about presenting your students with reasons to believe that your option is the best among the many options they are considering. Your job is to help students make a wise decision at a time when their choice will be life-altering.
You can try to do that with fluff and chatter about your amazing campus community. You can do that with messages about how much your admissions team and faculty, your entire campus really cares about each student. And you can be absolutely certain that each of the other institutions your prospective students are considering are saying the same exact thing with the same emphasis. Where, where, where is the differentiation? Where are the real reasons to believe?
Our data drives that differentiation home. Say something convincing about your institution with data to back it up.
We are excited about what we are about to share with all of you. We are not done crunching all the numbers, but we are almost there. We'll have it all together by the time the Intead team swarms all over New Orleans.
Take the time to meet with our team at NAFSA – we will be there in force. As usual, we don’t do a booth. Unlike other service providers in this field, we spread out and go to the sessions to learn and network with all of you. NAFSA is an amazing opportunity to learn and that is our mission for the week.
So, take a moment and reach out so that you can book some time with a member of our team and get a first-hand look at the new research we’ve done. The best way to connect: info@intead.com.
You’ll be glad you did.
And don’t miss out on downloading the budget planning slides from the AIRC Symposium. They will be available here to our blog subscribers for a week and then they will become part of our Intead Plus library and only available to Intead Plus subscribers.
Download my Budgeting for International Enrollment presentation.
