Recruiting Intelligence

This week we wrap up our three-part series on #FinTech, where we’re exploring how money for college can be found and moved faster, safer, and smarter, alleviating some of the headache for students, their families, and this time around, for university administrators. This is part of our focus on #EdTech and all the changes our industry is experiencing.

In our first piece, we talked about new student loan options, especially for students from underserved demographics, those looking for social equality, those who want unique repayment terms, and international students. Then last week, we jumped to alternative funding sources, such as micro funding, income share agreements, and new developments in scholarship FinTech.

Those areas of FinTech were all helpful to the students seeking ways to finance their educations and helpful for university administrators to understand as the financing tools and options you students can access change.

Today we are looking at what is new in the world of financial data and payment processing. Let's consider how your job might get a little easier.

And speaking of making your job a bit easier, we have 3 new Intead student recruiting research reports headed your way. Now is a great time to consider an Intead Plus Bookshelf subscription. Don’t miss these valuable reports to help you improve your institution’s recruitment game:

• Student Interactions on Peer-to-Peer Recruiting Platforms
• Student Interactions with Chatbots and other Artificial Intelligence Tools
• Student Recruiting in Emerging Markets: Africa and Latin America

Or you can learn from us with a personal meeting: we will be discussing our latest research and presenting our student recruitment insights at the upcoming TABS, ICEF and AIRC conferences. Email us to set up a meeting.

Read on for important insights into a set of really valuable questions you need to ask before embracing the latest FinTech tools…

When you think of student loans, your first thought might not be of the Space Race between the US and the Soviet Union, but that’s exactly where they started. Following the launch of the Soviet Sputnik, the first federal loan program began in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) to serve students studying engineering, science, or education degrees.

Since then, technology has rapidly advanced—both in outer space and right here in the earthly realm of higher education. Interestingly, tech has also advanced in how to finance education.

Continuing our exploration of #EdTech, today we are turning to FinTech in what will be a three-part series. Most of us have probably checked our bank balance online and many are cashing checks with a click of our cellphone cameras. The younger ones among us are transferring funds to each other using Venmo. (You had to pay your babysitter that way just the other week, didn't you?). These same digital advances in FinTech are starting to overlap with EdTech.

The rising cost of higher education is a huge concern for most students and families. Today we explore some of the new financial technologies that allow money to be moved faster, safer, and smarter for the students and families that are eager to attend your institution.

Why is this important?

Knowing what your target audience is into is always important from a recruitment and retention point of view. Is your institution making it easy for students to use the modern financial tools available?

In our FinTech series, we are going to look at new student loan offerings and alternative funding sources for scholarships and crowdsourcing. And while those are helpful on the student end, we will also discuss FinTech solutions for verifying financial details and aid approvals as well as payment management systems.

Quick reminder: This December, the Intead team will be attending the TABS conference in Boston, the ICEF conference in Miami Beach and the AIRC conference in Miami. Drop us an email if you’d like to meet and hear about our latest research. We are releasing 3 new market research reports in the coming months. So much insight!

Read on…

Remember Farmville? This one game grew to $200M USD in revenue! Now, not so much.

Remember Google Vine as short-form video? Kinda faded away with the advent of Instagram video.

So now, we consider TikTok and wonder, how long will this one last? This one is sophisticated and is already valued at more than $1B USD. This new marketing channel is powerful as long as you have the creative talent to use it.

The rule is: creative content rules. Period.

And the reason we are talking about it is that your target audience is spending a bunch of time there right now. The image above is captured from my 17-year-old niece's TikTok account. She is a content creator there and she and her friends have a great deal of fun (and spend way too much time) in and on TikTok. 

So, about TikTok...in May, we wrote about the growth of Chinese EdTech and what opportunities that presented. As of last year, Chinese startups received over 50 percent of all global capital invested in EdTech. This year, of the top six EdTech unicorns—private companies worth more than $1 billion—all but one was Chinese.

With the largest population in the world, China is automatically the greatest educational market. With a population of over 1.4 billion, there’s a market of more than 283 million students. With 17 million new babies born a year in China, this pattern isn’t slowing down.

Outside of the educational realm, tech is still booming in China, and one platform from China is now the most valuable startup in the world. What might this have to do with connecting you to those potential students in China—or anywhere for that matter?

Read on…

Last February, we talked about the intense and growing competition within the EdTech industry and new ways of delivering educational content, like the immersive learning experiences of augmented reality and virtual reality. These simulative experiences as of 2017 garnered $3.1 billion in investments, and those numbers are set to grow.

Community colleges are, traditionally, locally-minded places (hey, it’s right there in the name).  But two-year campuses have as much to gain from cultivating a diverse and global student body as any other educational institution—and international students have much to gain from considering this non-traditional avenue to an American diploma.

Our Enrollment management friends at 4-year institutions have long looked to community colleges as a valuable pathway for recruiting international students already studying here in the US. With roughly 95,000 international students studying at US community colleges (thanks for tracking this IIE), this makes a nice pipeline for 4-year institutions seeking students who have already succeeded at acquiring a US visa. 

Another recruitment channel where international students already have acquired a US visa: US private high schools with more than 80,000 international students. We'll be talking to the private high school community at the TABS Global Symposium on April 30, 2019 in Newport, RI. Join us there and build important relationships to become more effective with this valuable recruitment pipeline.

Do you work at a 2-year institution? Are you at a 4-year institution interested in a quality recruitment stream? This topic matters to all of us. Keep reading.