Recruiting Intelligence

India is the second largest source country for students who are looking to study abroad (China tops the list).   However, the complexion of the study abroad market in India has changed a lot. Ten years ago, the USA and UK were the top destinations, but now we see Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia, Ireland and other non-traditional destinations like The Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, China and Taiwan all actively wooing Indian students.

This is the second installment of a three part series. Click to read Part I.

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.

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.

It's like a sea of alphabet soup. NAFSA, NACAC, OACAC, ICEF, AIEA, AAIE, EAIE, EIEIO...the list goes on and on. (And of course we are kidding about that last one!) What is a new international admission, advising or services professional to do when encountering this vast array of professional organizations? While all of these organizations are reputable, educational, and professionally minded, it would behoove you to spend some time researching where your interests and skill set would be best met. It will be impossible (and cost prohibitive) to join every organization that exists. Yet with some research you will be able to discover which organizations will best advance your career and expose you to the most relevant research and professional discourse.

Why your international student applicants won't brag. Susan Cain's book  Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking reminded me of my own experience as a German student applying to U.S. graduate schools 25 years ago. I wrote my draft essays and shared them with a Canadian friend at my German university. She gave me a lot of advice and edit suggestions on how to present myself in the essay and how to talk about my accomplishments. I was rather taken aback to change the more modest style to describing overtly how great I was.  From a German cultural perspective, this was inappropriate.  Well, my friend's editing suggestions seem to have been helpful and I was admitted to three U.S. graduate schools.  

Sometimes I try to imagine what it was like before I could Google everything I ever wanted to know. It's hard to believe that such a time existed considering our reliance on internet searches. I Google restaurants, maps, colleagues, stores, toys for my children. You name it, I've Googled it. And you can be sure if I'm traveling I conduct a series of Google searches. If I'm heading out of the country Google is my best resource for information. Google images takes it to the next level with pages of images to accompany any search I can imagine.