Tag: higher education

SHORELIGHT REPORT AND STUDENT SAFETY – ILLUMINATION OR OBFUSCATION?

We are familiar with the notion that there are “lies, damned lies and statistics” so whenever an organisation throws up figures to paint a scenario that is in their interests it’s always worth taking a second look at the source data.  Students, parents and agents should particularly beware claims made primarily for marketing purposes when safety issues are at stake.  Caution is certainly a good approach to take with the recent collaboration between Shorelight and US News Global Education (USNGE) which includes a, so called, University Safety Index and league table of the safest States for international students.

There is no place in the world that is entirely free of potential trouble, and international students should be alert to both the joys and the potential troubles of studying overseas*.  The widespread rise in hate crimes around the world and specific incidents of racism are as concerning for the UK, Australia and Canada as the USA. Reputable universities work hard to make their campuses as safe as possible but the advice to incoming international students should be pragmatic rather than marketing gloss. 

There is no reason to believe that the numbers used are incorrect but the way the Index is constructed shows Washington D.C., Vermont and Massachusetts as the top three states of “the “extremely safe” category for international students.”  In September 2021 these States were listed as the top three of the list for Hate Crimes per capita in a 24/7 Wall Street report using FBI Uniform Crime Data and the FBI data shows Washington D.C. as having the US’s most violent crime rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020.  Further analysis suggests these anomalies reflect a selection and conflation of data that may mislead international students about the relative safety of their study destination.

Table Source: University Safety Index: State Safety by International Student Enrollment Percentage from How Safe Are U.S. Campuses?

Not All Crime on US Campuses is In Decline

While focusing on a comparison to criminal offenses two decades ago the Shorelight/USNGE’s own graph (below) shows that the “criminal offenses on campus” were comparatively higher in 2019 than five years before.   Also, the long term decline is largely due to a fall in motor theft, robbery and burglary which masks other trends on offenses against the person.  The U.S. Department of Education’s Campus Safety and Security Survey (CSS Survey), the source of the Shorelight/USNGE data on criminal offenses, shows that hate crimes, “sex-offences-forcible” and violence against women (VAWA) have increased in recent years.

Source: University Safety Index: State Safety by International Student Enrollment Percentage from How Safe Are U.S. Campuses? By Selene Angier 

Since 2014 the number of cases historically recorded by the CSS Survey as “Sex Offenses – Forcible”, increased 65% from 7,955 to 13,121 by 2019.  Since 2014 these offenses have been reported separately as “rape” or “fondling” with the former growing 33.5% and the latter by 124.2%.  A National Center for Education Statistics summary reflects these figures and notes that “according to reports in a student survey administered at several dozen large universities, officially reported sexual assaults represented only a minority of sexual assaults that occurred.”  

There has been excellent progress in reducing motor theft, burglary and robbery but the situation appears to have worsened in terms of sexually related offenses.  Offenses recorded as “aggravated assault” also remain stubbornly around the 4,000 mark. Mixing and matching the categories of crimes against property and crimes against the person fails to offer clarity that might be helpful in assessing risk.

Source: U.S. Department of Education Campus Safety and Security Trend Data

The CSS Survey also shows, separately, a 47% growth in reported offenses of violence against women, from 12,232 in 2014 to 17,578 in 2018 (the most recent data).  These have been registered since the Violence Against Women ReAuthorization Act 2013 (VAWA) brought changes to Clery Act reporting requirements.  With estimates that over 40% of international students are women it would seem reasonable to reflect this information in an article on campus safety.

Source: U.S. Department of Education Campus Safety and Security Trend Data

International Student Safety Off-Campus Matters

The CSS Survey data only includes cases, “…on campus, on property controlled by the university or a student organization, or on public property immediately adjacent to campus.” By using this measure the Shorelight/USNGE Index removes any information about the towns and cities where international students will hope to be welcomed.  This contributes to the leap of logic that establishes a league table of “the safest states to study in” which doesn’t include any city-wide or state-wide crime data.

The principle of aggregating data across a state is, itself, highly questionable when it comes to giving a student information on selecting a specific destination.  The statistician joke, credited to C. Bruce Grossman, that with your head in the oven and your feet in the freezer you are comfortable on average, comes to mind.  This consequences are evident as soon as you begin to consider more wide-ranging data about the crime rates in different cities.

In 2021 US News and World Report considered Massachusetts the 7th safest state in the US (although only 24th lowest for violent crime) but COVE Home Security in 2017 suggested the chances of being a victim of violent crime in Boston made “the city less safe than 83 percent of US cities”.  Neighbourhod Scout indicates that UMass Amherst is in a town that has a crime rate of 5.99 per 1,000 residents while UMass Boston is in a city with a crime rate of 26.45 per 1,000 residents.  Shorelight/USNGE use their Index to say both universities “…are located in the “extremely safe” category for international students” even though the numbers suggest the locations are quite different in terms of crime.

Washington DC, according to the Index is an ‘Extremely Safe’ State despite a 2019 crime rate which some sources indicate is 1.8 times higher than the US average and higher than in 95.5% of US cities.  American University’s campus may be a haven of civility and courtesy but students would probably be wise to exercise appropriate caution when they move onto the surrounding streets.  The university provides personal safety tips to international students which is both responsible and appropriate.       

Hate Crime is Relevant to International Students

The report is heavy on presenting data to reassure international students, yet surprisingly silent on the incidence of Hate Crimes recorded by the CSS Survey.  It was a 2008 amendment to the Clery Act which required post secondary institutions to report these incidents.  In 2018 the National Center for Education Statistics indicated that 43% of reported Hate Crimes in 2018 were motivated by racial bias.

The data presents a grim picture with a spike over the most recent years which is of relevance to students travelling to the US from abroad.  This may not fit the Shorelight/USNGE narrative but it is an important issue if students are to be given the most complete picture.  The Australian response to international students who are victims of crime might also inspire positive initiatives to engage productively with the issue rather than ignore it.

Source: U.S. Department of Education Campus Safety and Security Trend Data

At a state level Shorelight/USNGE report considers Massachusetts “extremely safe” for international students but the state’s campuses rank behind only New York (250) and California (174) in terms of reported Hate Crimes in the Survey.  The trend has been remorselessly upward for a decade.  In the broader Massachusetts context even the Editorial Board of the Boston Globe has recently argued that the situation in the state is serious enough to warrant its legislature updating hate crime laws.

Source: U.S. Department of Education Campus Safety and Security Trend Data

Whose Facts for What Purpose?

It is not unusual for organizations to give the most positive presentation of their situation and the Index is positioned as a response to a situation where “news headlines and social media shares can unfairly grab attention and raise concerns”.  But it seems specious to suggest that “U.S. News and Global Education (USNGE) and Shorelight — two leaders in U.S. higher education — have partnered to develop the University Safety Index” when one is owned by the other.  It also seems misleading to present the item as news on a website where the branding gives the gloss and reflected credibility of US News and World Report’s league tables.

While the article is designated as “News” the authorship, data and presentation of universities looks like an inside marketing job.  The writer was once on staff for Shorelight, has written regularly for the company’s website and describes herself as a “content manager specializing in e-commerce marketing, UX messaging and lifestyle brands.” The statistics were compiled by Shorelight’s vice president of data science and strategy.

The marketing dimension becomes even more clear when “Notable U.S. News Global Education Universities” are highlighted – they just happen to be Shorelight partners.  There is, however, no mention that the lowest “Somewhat Safe” category of the Index features Florida and Illinois where Shorelight has partnerships with Florida International University, University of Central Florida and University of Illinois at Chicago as well as new partner Eureka College.  The implication of the Index is that international students have more reason to be concerned about safety if they go to those institutions but that seems a less palatable marketing statement.       

Summary

Several countries and many universities are in a headlong dash for more international students and most recently Colleges Ontario commented on the need to recruit them to fill funding gaps. CBC News recently reported on the problems for students from south Asia who had arrived to study in Calgary but couldn’t find jobs and were unprepared for the winter weather. It’s a toxic mix where students are not getting realistic information about the situations they will encounter and there is every chance it will end in tragedy for individuals as well as blemishes on institutional reputations.

Fall intakes have shown that international students are returning to the US in significant numbers after the pandemic but it is entirely possible that some will have lingering doubts about attitudes towards foreign visitors. It is, however, unhelpful to underestimate the importance of ensuring that young people are given balanced information and not lured into a false sense of security.  International students are courageous, committed and deserve more respect than that.       

The US should also be applauded for publishing campus crime data in a consistent manner and might consider positioning this as a competitive advantage over the UK where there is a growing clamour for better data on student-related crime. While the Complete University Guide is to be commended for giving comparative information on an issue where one in five students are likely to be a victim, action from HESA or the Office for Students would be welcome.  For international students, agents and other decision makers the best advice is to demand information directly from your university of choice and avoid sales promotion gimmicks.

NOTES

*  I am not aware of any comprehensive and credible research on which countries are safest for international students. Various guides exist but tend to base their outcomes on overall country statistics. The Founder and CEO of iSchool Connect based a recent table in The Tribune of India on indexes covering factors such as Global Peace, quality of life etc. It includes Singapore at number five – a country where the Prime Minister has recently acknowledged “resentment over foreigners”.

**US News Global Education was formed as a collaboration between US News and World Report (USNWR) and Shorelight but is a subsidiary of Shorelight. The University Safety Index is a reminder of the link to USNWR’s own league tables whose methodology ex-Editor Peter Bernstein, in a classic Freudian slip, called “this mythology.”

***This blog relies, in part, upon my understanding and interpretation of various data sources and media reports. While data is almost always partial in the way it is collected, categorized and presented I have considered a range of sources in an attempt to ensure the points made about specific locations are reasonable. I am happy to correct any material errors brought to my attention by an authoritative source.

Pathways to the Future for US Big Two?

Open Doors Fall 2021 snapshot offered some solace for international student recruiters in the US after the strong headwinds of recent years.  It comes after nearly two years of pandemic that has seen a focus on technology enabled learning options, increased online language testing and a brutal culling of pathway relationships during 2019 and 2020.  A deeper dive into the numbers suggests that fundamentals are changing in ways that will have a material impact on the future of the private pathway providers.

Global demographics indicate that future growth will be driven by India and south-east Asia with a Mitchell Institute report indicating that “India has now overtaken China as the largest source country of international students.”  The majority of Open Doors respondents are now prioritizing recruitment in India – 56% in 2021 compared to 45% in 2019 – compared to China where the percentage is now 51% compared to 58% two years ago.  However, an increasing numbers of international students seeking graduate level study and having reasonable proficiency in English will brings challenges for pathways in their existing format.  

If Chinese students become less willing to travel due to caution over health, political factors and declining returns on investment in a western degree the problems will be compounded.  INTO’s own research from November 2021 notes that agents from China, Hong Kong and Macau think that the US has handled the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out considerably worse than the UK or Australia.  The rankings for the US being “welcoming and safe” are even less helpful.

Source: Agent Perspective on International Education in the Context of COVID-19, INTO University Partnerships, November 2021

The two established pathway operators with most at stake in the US are Shorelight and INTO but recent developments suggest differences in their willingness and ability to innovate, adjust strategy and move decisively.  It has been eight years since Shorelight burst onto the scene with a model that looked like an enhanced version of INTO’s pathway operation but VP Imran Oomer’s early claim that “we wanted to come in without a formula” was an indication of being willing to adapt. Shorelight now has at least 17 pathway partnerships while INTO has lost Marshall University, Washington State University and Colorado State University in the past three years to reduce it to a portfolio of nine US partners.

Past success is not always an indicator of future prosperity but a brief review of the two companies suggests how they might fare under current circumstances. The context and references are in the public domain and offer some grounds for speculation about possible directions of travel.                     

Shorelight

Shorelight announced five new partners towards the end of 2021 – Eureka College (Illinois), Austin College (Texas), St Thomas Aquinas (New York), Southwestern College (Texas) and Wilson College (Pennsylvania).  It seems a significant shift of emphasis for a business which had previously focused almost entirely on partnerships with US News and World Report nationally ranked institutions.   The announcements say that they are “accepting international undergraduate student applications through Shorelight” which indicates these are not the full pathway model. 

It’s always been difficult to see inside Shorelight’s finances and performance but there have been several indicators that enrollment aspirations for some partnerships have fallen short of expectations.  Huron Consulting Group Inc’s third quarter filing in November 2021 show that the ‘fair value’ of the convertible debt investment in Shorelight was reduced from $64.4m (December 2020) to $61.5m.  The total cost basis over three tranches (2014, 2015 and 2020) was $40.9m with a consolidated maturity date of January 2024.

In November 2021, CIBC Innovation Banking announced new debt financing for Shorelight although the amount was undisclosed.  The announcement says that the money will be used to “invest in automated, self-service tools for students, counselors and universities engaged on its platform” which may be a glimpse of the future of the Shorelight business. This echoes the language of the recruitment aggregators who have been able to secure significant investor funding in recent years. 

The latest surge in partners may be designed to impress potential new investors.  US recruitment conditions have eased and a robust pitch highlighting online delivery, long-term contractual partnerships with well-known brands and a burgeoning new stream of direct recruitment partners could be attractive.  Memories of the past few years of international enrollment declines are fading but with the mid-term elections in 2022 and a Presidential election now just three years away it could be a small window of opportunity.

More intriguingly, Shorelight may be in a position where a capacity for online delivery, the option of face-to-face study and a technology-led recruitment capability has made it into a credible prototype one-stop shop for student needs.  A decent number of strong brand names, a deepening pool of price points and a widening range of institutional types makes the portfolio big enough to provide a credible breadth of choice.  With reasonable post-study work options in the US, a more benign visa regime and evidence of demand from high-growth source countries there could be some attraction to playing the longer game.      

INTO

INTO’s performance has been reasonably well recorded over the past few years and the new year sees the six-month anniversary of CEO Olivia Streatfield’s tenure.  The recent departure of the company’s Chief Recruitment Officer offers scope for a revitalization of a top team that has been virtually unchanged for over five years.  Cumulative losses of partners in both the US and UK may have undermined the company’s ability to capitalize on blossoming UK enrollment and the resurgence of the US.

Over a five-year period, where it has lost six face-to-face pathways while major competitors have been growing their portfolios, INTO’s competitive edge has looked increasingly blunted.  Linking with Cialfo arguably handed ownership of a key recruitment channel to a third party after the 2020 annual report had trumpeted the acquisition of Schoolapply AG as “part of its strategy to continue develop (sic) its technology platform to maximise student recruitment…”.  Schoolapply was closed down in February 2021, just nine months after the purchase.     

There are few signs of INTO responding effectively to the opportunities arising from online learning. By contrast Study Group has Insendi, CEG Digital has seven online university partners, Shorelight has Shorelight Live and American Collegiate Live, and Kaplan is working with Purdue and has online UK partners.  Even relative newcomer Oxford International Education Group, which is opening its first US operation in 2022, has established a “Digital Institute”. 

INTO’s most recent partnership in the US is the direct recruitment relationship with University of Arizona (UoA) which reflects the recent direction of partnerships announced by Shorelight and Study Group.  It is not a competitive differentiator but may be a wise first step away from the pathway model at a point when enrollments at Oregon State University offer an insight into the problems as international student mobility trends shift.  Declining enrollments at the INTO OSU pathway operation are driven by a significant decline in students from China but there is no evidence that enrollments from India are increasing to pick up the slack. 

Source: Oregon State University, Institutional Research Enrollment and Demographic Reports

The past year has also seen INTO announce its first partnership in Australia which provides an even more complex set of options for its sales team to manage.  Diversity can be an attractive feature but often comes at the expense of spreading management talent too thinly and confusing the market. By contrast Shorelight has retained a laser focus on working with US institutions while diversifying the ways in which it can serve the needs of agents and students.          

INTO’s UK and US portfolio could support a level of organic growth as student mobility increases but a trade purchaser looking to beef up existing operations in the UK, US and Australia may be better able to optimize the assets.  With money still cheap and a lot of dry powder around it would not be too difficult to see one of the major global players, with relevant management chops and sales expertise, trying to find some synergies.  It would also be interesting to see if the management team has enough confidence in its skill and ability to invest in itself, buy out the Leeds Equity stake and compete aggressively in the new world.

It is appropriate to reflect that demand for US higher education remains strong throughout south Asia and that record numbers of study visas were approved for students from India. For operators that can meet that demand with a mixed US portfolio offering realistic options while also catering to the students considering online options as part of their planning process the future could be bright. While reflections on the future of the current big two pathways operators are speculative there is no doubt it will need an agile, flexible and committed approach to make the most of the changed circumstances.

  

Advising the Advisers

Advisory boards have a long history and can be genuine forces for industry insight, expert advice and sound counsel.  As we have seen with Theranos and Enron they can also be stacked full of notable and well respected names to provide comfort to outsiders without much impact on management behaviour. With private money flooding into edtech there seems to have been an increase in advisory appointments and it is to be hoped that they will bring benefits to universities and students. 

Recent developments at ApplyBoard, THE Student and LeverageEdu and longer standing arrangements, bring higher education insiders firmly alongside commercial organizations that are trying to grow their business in higher education. Motives will differ but there is always a degree of flattery in being singled out as a “thought leader” and invited to join a group of colleagues to give your opinion without having any responsibility for delivery.  Those with an authoritative voice in education circles might also argue that influencing, or learning from, a commercial organization engaged with the sector is always a good thing. 

For the commercial partner there are clear benefits to being closely associated with reputable individuals. This is particularly so where the very presence of their names on the website, or at events and making introductions, brings instant credibility.  It can sometimes go wrong but rarely turns into the public resignation crises encountered by Pride in London, the UK’s Science Museum, or software company Afiniti. 

Whatever the purpose of the appointment it would seem to be in the interests of the adviser, the commercial entity and industry stakeholders to make the terms of engagement transparent. Advisers might also consider flagging their role at any event where the subject comes up and confirming whether it reflects any opinion on the merit of one commercial organization over its competitors. The Advisory Board Centre (which appears to operate mainly across Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore) also has some interesting reading on the subject.

Apply Carefully

The stated purpose of the ApplyBoard UK advisory board is to “guide and support ApplyBoard’s expansion within the United Kingdom”. Recent ApplyBoard advisory appointee, Prof Sir Steve Smith, was billed in his role UK Government International Education Champion when he presented at a recent ApplyBoard event described as a “closed door briefing” for UK vice chancellors.    It’s entirely possible the advisory role was announced or well known to the audience but they might legitimately wonder if his role implies any views about the company’s market position compared to commercial competitors. 

Two other recent appointees to this advisory board have roles with HEPI*, which has long positioned itself as the “UK’s only independent think tank devoted to higher education”.   One industry commentator described the new board members as “smart cookies along with £3bn betting on AB and you are betting against it, you braver than I!” (sic). It will be interesting to watch how praise or criticism is allocated in any HEPI articles** about the role of aggregators and whether there will be an appetite to consider the policy questions around possible regulation.

Slice of the Pie

LeverageEDU recently announced the addition of the CEO and founder of PIE News to its advisory board. There is one other advisory member, Karan Khemka, formerly of EY Parthenon and now a portfolio board member and investor, who is also a Director of agent aggregator Adventus.  The PIE has published extensively on the aggregator community and announced Khemka’s appointment but its own CEO’s new role doesn’t appear to have been important enough to make even the “movers” section of the publication. 

Oversight or Oversight?

THE Student’s global student advisory board has gone the route of appointing individuals with roles in universities. The Chair of the Board says (of edtech) that “it’s vital that the university sector has oversight of this newly emerging field”.  There would be a lot of agreement on that but, unless there is some undeclared governance aspect, an advisory board doesn’t usually provide oversight or binding advice.

The board has representatives from several parts of the world but one of the biographies on the website is already out of date.  David Pilsbury is shown as Deputy Vice Chancellor, International at Coventry University, a role he left in June 2021, and he is now Chief Development Officer at Oxford International Education Group.  In the interests of transparency it seems reasonable to expect that Advisory Board profiles are kept up to date.

A Portal to Misinformation

The relative newness of the THE board may save it from an even poorer showing at StudyPortals where four of the nine members of the UK Advisory Board have moved on from the positions described on the website.  Andrew Didsbury left the University of West Scotland in January 2019; Ken Gill left NCUK in May 2019; Dr Sonal Minocha is now a Professor and left Bournemouth in December 2018; and; Dr David Pilsbury (the same one as on the THE Board), left Coventry University in June 2021.  If students are reassured that Study Portals is taking advice from an Advisory Board entirely made up of stalwarts from UK universities they are sadly mistaken.

Most of those moving have gone on to roles in commercial roles. Didsbury has become President UK at MSquare Media which describes itself as a “leading global service provider and international education platform”; Pilsbury is Chief Development Officer at Oxford International Education Group and Minocha is Chief Academic Officer and Co-CEO at a yet to be announced edtech venture.  Worth adding here that MSquare Media has a UK and Europe Advisory Board with eight external worthies from UK universities and the British Council – the biographies look totally up to date.

Pathways to Confusion

Senior university figures engaging with commercial entities have a particular need to ensure that their role is not misunderstood and Professor Sir David Eastwood’s appointment with INTO University Partnerships (IUP) may offer some lessons.  After becoming VC of the University of Birmingham in 2009 he became a Director of IUP in 2014, but when the university UCU union branch asked in 2018 why this interest was not declared during discussions on student recruitment, he was re-classified by the university as “non-executive” director of IUP.  The UK’s Institute of Directors state that “there is no legal distinction between executive and non-executive directors”.

There appears to be no recorded comment on motivations for taking the post or what benefit the University got from the appointment but it must be assumed that the appropriate university authorities gave approval.*** Eastwood is due to have a statue honouring him erected on the Birmingham campus when he retires later this year and currently holds 258000 C Ordinary Shares in IUP.  His current profile on the university website describes him “a Board Member and Non-Executive Director of INTO University Partnerships” while IUP’s pages describe him as a Board Director.

Slippery Pole or Path to Glory

The worthiest and most high-minded motives can be misunderstood and it is reasonable to know whether people, particularly those in positions of power and influence, have any personal stake in a cause they are discussing.  The contemporary debate in the UK about MPs having second jobs or using their position to lobby for commercial organizations is not directly equivalent but reflects the risks caused by uncertainty over motives and rewards.  As Warren Buffett reminds us, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

NOTES

Material presented in this blog reflects publicly available information with the links given checked in the period up to 3 December 2021.  If there are any errors or misrepresentations they will be amended on receipt of authoritative and documented evidence.  Individuals who wish to clarify the nature of their agreement, including any benefits received or anticipated, with the commercial company mentioned will have that information added to this blog.      

* HEPI is a company limited by guarantee and a registered charity and “aim to be transparent in our funding”.  Broadly 45% of income comes from HE institutions, 30% from corporate partners, 15% from events and the rest from co-sponsored projects.

** HEPI’s work is guided by an Advisory Board appointed by the Trustees.  The Board’s role is “only to give advice to the Director”

US Rebound, Pathway Woes and A World of Opportunity

Watching the gyrations of international recruitment as the pandemic, global tensions and the rise of online opportunities work their way through the sector is enough to make anyone slightly queasy.  There is still plenty to play for and with Australia looking ready to re-enter the fray in 2022 it is going to be a fascinating ride.  But for now it’s time to digest the latest Open Doors figures and have a small look under the hood to see what might be happening in the pathway sector.

The Open Doors press release trumpeted 914,095 international students for the 2020/21 academic year which was a 15% decline year on year.  But the inclusion of OPT (203,885) and non-degree students (21,151) doesn’t make a reasonable comparison with some other countries and when you strip them out the UG and Graduate student number is 689,069 – a 13% decline on the previous year.  The 45.6% year on year decline in new student enrollment becomes a slightly more palatable 39.9% with the removal of non-degree students.

But the real excitement was around the bounceback in the 860 university snapshot survey conducted by the Institute of International Education (IIE).  This suggested that new international students enrollments grew by 68% year on year to Fall 2021.  The obvious point to make is that if 2020/21 international student enrollment (including non-degree) was 145,528 then a 68% increase would take it to 244,487 which is still a lower new student intake than any year since 2011.

It’s good news that several US universities provide open and near contemporaneous access to detailed levels of information on international student recruitment which allows us to look under the hood and down to the pathway level.  It’s a state of affairs that Canada, the UK and Australia (which goes some of the way) should think of emulating.  Meanwhile, Fall 2021 updates from INTO University Partnerships (IUP) partners Oregon State University and George Mason University show how tough some are still finding things at direct and pathway levels.

Oregon State University (OSU)

IUP’s corporate website has an encouraging graph which shows the OSU international student growth story all the way up to 2019/20 so a visual moving the picture forward to Fall 2021 seems a helpful contribution.  The deterioration in undergraduate numbers is particularly evident as the university’s total enrollment falls to near 2012 levels and 2021 shows a further decline of 10% from 2020.  A wider consideration going forward may be that if there is a shift in major source countries the balance of UG to graduate enrollments may change for all universities with significant consequences for year on year stability.

Source: Oregon State University Institutional Research Office  

The situation for the INTO pathway operation at OSU is even more stark.  From a high point in 2014 the trend has been almost wholly downwards with a 78.7% decline in enrollments to 319 in 2021.  While the early stages of decline were in Academic English the most recent shrinkage has been in the core undergraduate and postgraduate intakes.

Source: Oregon State University Institutional Research Office  

INTO George Mason University (INTO GMU)

INTO GMU saw reasonable growth in its first two years and peaked at an enrollment of 387 in 2016.  Five years of decline has seen the 2021 intake down to 96 – a 75.2% fall from the peak with graduate and undergraduate numbers following similar paths.  INTO University Partnerships (IUP) July 2020 accounts show that INTO GMU’s level of debt to IUP had grown from £566k to £1.896m so it will be interesting to see how the 2021 annual report looks.

Source: GMU Office of Institutional Research and Reporting

To be fair and reasonable the announcement of the deal between IUP and GMU anticipated that the venture would add 1,000 international students to the university over five years.  In Fall 2014 the university’s census recorded a headcount of 2,136 non-resident aliens on GMU’s US campuses and by Fall 2019 that had risen to 3,247 so the original mission was accomplished.  The numbers for the pathway suggest that direct recruitment will have helped that along and tracking what happens next will be fascinating.

It’s difficult not to note that IUP, the pioneer of joint venture pathways, has had a bumpy few years with partnerships in the UK and US falling by the wayside.  Executive chairman, John Latham left the business on 31 October after being at IUP since April 2016 and just a few months after new Chief Executive, Olivia Streatfeild, was appointed around June this year.  INTO the Great Wide Open suggested some of the strategic issues the business faces with the suggestion that it “needs to establish some renewed momentum if it is to fulfil the promise of its early days of innovation, creativity and energy.”

Outside, the CEO and Chief Recruitment Officer, the IUP leadership team has been in place for five years or longer.  It’s a period that has seen six joint ventures close, three in the US and three in the UK, with little to match the growth of Shorelight in the US, no new UK partners and the recent addition of University of Western Australia in beleaguered Australia.  There are plenty of adjustments in the financial reporting but one measure of performance might be Total Comprehensive Income at Group level which looks to have moved from £8m to £12m over the period.

With the US and UK governments setting out to support ambitious growth targets and a reawakening of student mobility there should be good opportunities for nimble operations with a good foothold in key markets to move forward.  New operators and established companies, particularly in the UK, are showing that universities are still looking for support and Shorelight’s recent announcement of partnership with Austin College suggests there are opportunities in the US.  To borrow from Sherlock Holmes “the game’s afoot” but whether the answer is “elementary” remains to be seen.

Note: The data is gathered from public sources and referenced as necessary. In the event that there is a misinterpretation or error I am always happy to make amendments if approached with appropriate, verifiable information from an authoritative source.

Keep Your Virtue*…Ignore the Reputation Rankings

If Government took an “experienced, published” scholar and said they would have to spend the next 21 years working only on a vanity project, the higher education community would be outraged at the waste of time, intellect and potential.  But that’s what the THE Reputation Rankings 2021 appear to be doing by having around 11,000 such scholars submitting views on which other universities are good at research and teaching.  It’s only the beginning of the problem for another dreary day in the self-interested world of the rankers.

We are told that academics are hard-pressed and facing mental burnout but that doesn’t stop the THE taking their valuable time to seek opinions about other institutions.  If each of the 10,963 respondents spent half a working day on their submission that would be 5,481 days.  Dividing that by 260 working days a year (a five-day working week times 52 with no holidays) suggests THE may have taken more than two decades of academic time away from scholarship that could save humanity.

Twisted by Knaves to Make a Trap for Fools

Despite, or perhaps because of, all that effort it comes as a yawn inducing revelation that the top five in 2021 are exactly the same universities as the top five in both 2020 and 2019.  The procession of Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, Oxford and Stanford – placed alphabetically here because the whole notion of ranking them seems ludicrous – continues.  In a world where the purpose of higher education, its value and its relevance are all under question this parade of hierarchy seems irrelevant.  

I wonder how Harvard’s reputation really looks to people who agree with Scott Galloway that higher education is becoming “the enforcer of a caste system” where “elite institutions no longer see themselves as public servants”.  Or Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, when he says that HE is increasingly a system “where status is derivative of exclusion”.  Or to those who have listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s forensic dissection of the US News rankings, where he notes that they are “a self-fulfilling prophecy”.

There should also be an enquiry into the fact that California Institute of Technology (CalTech) is only placed at 14 in the Reputation Rankings.  On THE Student the compilers are telling thousands of candidates that CalTech is the best university in the US,  QS rank it at 6 in the world, it’s number 9 in US News and number 2 in the THE’s own World Rankings.  There are several other examples illustrating inconsistencies which confirm that the whole exercise isn’t really about understanding or reflecting excellence.

One might guess that the opportunity to reach out and flatter 10,963 potential readers and event attendees by asking for their opinion is a primary motivator of the approach taken.  But for THE to then claim the rankings are “based on the opinions of those who truly know” seems typically hyperbolic and ill-founded.  Donald A. Norman is quoted as saying – “academics get paid for being clever, not for being right” – which is an alternative view worth considering.  

Fill the Unforgiving Minute  

The 21-year estimate of time does, of course, presume that the academics involved took the weighty task of considering the reputational implications for thousands of their colleagues at thousands of universities seriously.  Half a day hardly seems long enough to do the job properly but some cynics might suggest that it was more likely half-an-hour over a cup of coffee.  Plenty of time to see scores settled, biases reinforced and best friends rewarded. 

Even half an hour for each submission would be about two-and-a-half years of time stolen from saving the world and brings equally good questions about the value of the exercise.  Each academic submitted around 14 names on average which which, in 30 minutes, means they would take about two minutes to weigh and consider each nomination.  It’s less time and attention than most people spend on selecting their top ten favourite party records for the Christmas playlist.  

Make Allowance for their Doubting Too

The reputation rankings methodology** specifically gives “more weight to research”.  This is not because research is intrinsically more important but because “our expert advisers have suggested that there is greater confidence in respondents’ ability to make accurate judgements about research quality”.  It is interesting to read that THE’s advisers thinks academics can’t really be trusted to review the teaching quality of their peers. 

Pity the poor student who believe the Reputation Rankings have much to do with the teaching they might receive.  The methodology places a premium on the score for research reputation of 2:1 over the score for teaching reputation.  This gives some idea of the importance that THE attributes to teaching in establishing an institution’s standing and the extent to which academics are contributing to perceptions about their priorities.

One Heap of All Your Winnings

It also seems that the eventual ranking is driven as much by volume as by quality.  Respondents are asked to simply name, rather than rank, up to 15 institutions which are best at research and teaching) in their specific subject discipline.  But the number one institution “is the one selected most often” as being one of the best in its field.

It doesn’t seem to matter if the twenty most eminent researchers in each field believes your university is the best.  You will not be top if enough other “experienced, published” researchers pick the place where they are angling for a job, enjoy to visit or where the overlord of research is a personal friend.  There is no indication in the methodology that there is a weighting to account for the ability of the respondents to make or offer a well-informed judgement.

Or Being Lied About Don’t Deal In Lies

However, there are adjustments to ensure that the ranking represents the global distribution of scholars.  Participants are selected randomly from Elsevier’s SCOPUS database which can presumably create a sample in line with the global distribution of academics.  As responses do not reflect the UNESCO distribution of scholars so they have to be weighted.   

Engineering overperformed with 15.8% of respondents and had to be levelled down to a weighted 12.7% while Business and Economics and Arts and Humanities had to be levelled up from 8.2% and 7.7% of respondents to 13.1% and 12.5% respectively.  Maybe it’s just that engineers like questionnaires and giving their opinion but it would be nice to think that some scholars are too dismissive of the process to join in.

If the argument is that the Reputation Rankings are only a game and for entertainment then academics might consider how wise it is to be wasting their time on something as meaningful as voting on The X-Factor or Dancing With the Stars.  But if it is intended to inform politicians, funders, philanthropists and business about quality it carries the danger of reinforcing bias while devaluing other institutions, and their students.  Next time the email from THE pops up in the inbox it might be a good moment to press delete and get on with doing something important. 

NOTES

*Part of the title and all the sub-heading are fragments from Rudyard Kipling’s wonderful and inspirational poem ‘If’

** The page of description of the methodology is, in my view, neither clear or well written. I would be happy to clarify or correct any areas where my interpretation or understanding is incorrect on the advice of an authoritative source.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay      

It’s Only Just Out of Reach*

It’s always fun to write something that challenges current orthodoxy.  It is not about being right all the time but stimulating debate brings the potential for creative solutions and better solutions for students and society.  There is also the interesting spectacle of people defending the status quo and thinking nothing can or will ever change.

Recently, Louise Nicol and I co-authored a piece for University World News which exhorted the UK to ‘make hay’ while the sun of a benevolent international student environment shone down.  In the face of a beleaguered Australia, an overwhelmed Canada and a United States where every month brings a new twist or turn, it’s time to seize the day.  Or, as the UK Prime Minister could possibly say the UK needs to prenez le grip et donne nous the students.

The suggestion in the article was that the UK should not be thinking about being second in the world for international student recruitment but, specifically, “how and where can we be first?”.   Illustrating the potential was the Education International Cooperation Education Group survey which found, for the third consecutive year, that the UK achieved favoured status – something previously held by the United States.   It also noted that this year UG applications from India were up 30%, with the growth firming up as later data showing placed applicants up by the same percentage.

This led the authors to suggest that the UK Government target of 600,000 international students by 2030 should be revised to 750,000.   It’s a big number but UCL added over 7,000 international students in the four years to 2019/20 and there are more than 150 degree awarding institutions in the UK. A further 240 colleges in the UK provide complete courses leading to recognized UK degrees so the additional students could be spread even further.

Around the Corner

Even if it sounds a stretch target there are a range of data points to suggest what might be possible if there was the will.  If the proportion of international students studying for degrees in the UK was 33% of the total enrolled (UCL is at 53%) there would have been 844,000 of them in 2019/20.  A 44% increase on the 556,625 international students in UK universities in 2019/20 (including EU students), growth which Australia managed between 2016 and 2019, would take the number to 802,540.  All of this is without counting the 432,000 students doing UK degrees outside the country which means that nearly 1 million students around the globe are already studying for awards from UK institutions. 

It was, however, suggested by one respondent that “…the reality is the UK can never be #1. One of many reasons – institutional capacity”.  Fans of Maradona, Berra and Smith might agree more with Yoda’s wisdom that “size matters not” and I wondered what it would really take for the UK to overhaul the US as the leading international student recruiter.  There are several ways of measuring it but it’s surprising how close a race it could be.

First thing to say is that the Open Doors press release and headline figures for US international student enrollment embellishes the actuality.  You can remove 223,539 Optional Practical Training (OPT) that are included (because study is generally prohibited or incidental) and 58,201 non-degree entries from the 2019/20 total of 1,075,496.  That leaves 793,756 UG and Graduate students which is below the numbers noted in the ambitious growth UK scenario noted above.

Next point is that the US has been in a period of decline and Open Doors gives a number of 225,239 new UG and Graduate enrollments in 2019/20.  HESA indicates that the UK enrolled 319,825 first year non-UK students that year, with 255,710 being non-EU so it was ahead on new degree entry international students.  Continuing to close the gap at the rate of 30,000 a year would see the UK ahead of the US within eight years.

It seems reasonable to suggest that the engine of US growth for the past ten years has been Chinese students but that the coming ten years will bring different motivations and constraints.  A four-year undergraduate and two-year postgraduate system may be less attractive for international students who are anxious to get their degree and move on to work in the country of study.  In this respect the UK length of degree study has an advantage and its recently activated right to two years post study work is more accessible than the US options.    

India is likely to become the most important indicator as China’s demographics and attitudes change.  It’s early days but in the year to the end of June 2021 the UK issued 62,500 student visas for India – a rise of around 30 per cent on the previous year while a comparative figure for the US seems to be about 55,000.  These numbers suggest that the UK was ahead by 12.8% – a winning margin that would increase the world long jump to over 10 meters from its current standard of under 9 meters.

Maybe Just by Holding Still

It is true that the US has over 4,000 degree granting institutions so its capacity is extensive.  But it is more expensive; studying often takes longer; post study work is complex; there is a reputation in recent years for being less than welcoming and the lingering uncertainty of a different political viewpoint dominating in a few years.  The recent climate and the prospects were considered so poor that at least 18 US pathway operations closed in the past three years despite being operated by experienced companies that recruit over 15,000 international students a year in the UK. 

The scale of the decline in the US pathway operations has been brutal and is no better illustrated than INTO’s troubles at Oregon State University where an enrollment of 1,496 in Fall 2014 fell to 809 in 2019/20.  The US universities that have made significant progress in international recruitment and maintained momentum during the difficult recent years have invested over the long term to build infrastructure and expertise.  But, there seems no real evidence of a widespread, concerted attempt by the majority of US universities to do what is necessary to materially increase the number of international students they attract.

Meanwhile, the UK is rubbing its hands with glee at the recent news that the THRIVE Act could dissuade colleges from using international agents.  The Center for China and Globalization (CCG) has noted worsening China/USA relations impacting student choices and there seems little reason for agents, already under pressure from the rise of aggregators, to give preference to a country that has always been lukewarm to their role in student recruitment. The M Square Media (MSM) agent survey published in early 2021 showed the depth of the problem that has to be overcome. 

None of this is to say that the US, with its breadth and depth of quality institutions, cannot find its way back towards a position of substantial growth in the international student arena and remain number one for total volume.  But having capacity and wanting the cash from tuition fees is unlikely to be enough to compete effectively against countries that are hungry for success, offer easy routes to post-study work, make citizenship a realistic goal, and which are not likely to fundamentally alter the rules of the game with every change of Government.  Neither does it mean that the UK can’t aspire to dominate markets where its quality, variety, value, visa policies and record of engagement with local agents, schools and universities makes it a safer bet. 

NOTES

* All headings and sub-headings are derived from the song “Something’s Coming” from the irresistible West Side Story which celebrates the 60th anniversary of its release on film this year.  For my money Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim created the finest musical ever committed to film.  (Music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. © 1956, 1957 Amberson Holdings LLC and Stephen Sondheim. Copyright renewed.  Leonard Bernstein Music Publishing Company LLC, Publisher.)  

Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay 

Is a new Dark Age beckoning for higher education take up?

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece  First published in University World News, 29 September 2021

Many believe that going to university is a rite of passage and that young people and their parents will always make sacrifices for it.

For years the Grand Tour of Europe was similarly considered an educational and social milestone for young, privileged men to complete their education, but its attraction waned.

When technology made rail and sea travel accessible, Thomas Cook aggregated tourists on package holidays and rich young men lost their interest in neo-classical culture: the Grand Tour gave way to the “Cook’s Tour”.

Enabling technology, applicant aggregation and a growing dissatisfaction with educational outcomes are with us today. There is no reason that one generation’s rite of passage won’t become another’s dead-end junction and some warning signs are already showing.

It is possible to speculate on how the educational enlightenment of the past 70 years could mark the beginnings of a new dark age.

It’s just not worth it

A February 2021 House of Commons Briefing in the UK showed part-time entrants to university had collapsed from 470,000 in 2009/10 to 235,000 in 2019/20. The number of “white working-class boys” going to university continued to fall in 2021, with acceptances down 9.9% since 2014.

Across the Atlantic in the United States, higher education enrolment has fallen by an average of 1.67% per year since 2010.

Rumblings of discontent have been tracked in the US, with the Pew Research Center and Gallup finding declining confidence in higher education since 2015.

Some parts of the political spectrum are markedly more sceptical than others, but even where there is support, it has fallen in recent years.

A survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center and Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 29% of US adults did not think a college degree was “worth it”.

A OnePoll survey of UK postgraduates in 2021 found 46% did not think their university education was worth the money and over 30% did not need a degree to do their current job.

The Harris Poll in 2020 found 60% of student loan debtors in the US said their degree was not worth the student loan debt they had taken on. Whether it is the general public or the graduating class – scepticism is evident and increasing.

Government views are also shifting with the UK removing the long term ambition of 50% of young people participating in higher education and calling it an “absurd mantra”.

When an education minister says that university education is not what the individual or country needs, is “low value” and carries an “inbuilt snobbishness” it is difficult to see why the public should keep the faith.

All at a time when young people are graduating into a post-pandemic world which has brought new uncertainty to their first steps on the career ladder.

Zombie Gen Z to the Alpha Dawn

Generational shifts take time and if the average age of a new parent is around 28, we are seeing the last of Generation X’s (1965 to 1980) children going to higher education.

Those parents, along with the media and successive governments, told Gen Z (1997 to 2012) that a degree was the route to a career and a better life. Maybe that is why Gen Z didn’t question the aspirational mindset society encouraged when university was effectively free in the UK and you could even get a grant to cover living costs.

But the last of the Millennials, Gen Y (1981 to 1996), are finding out that traditional graduate industries are embracing the digital revolution and squeezing out many of the first steps on the career ladder. Economic indicators point to young people today being worse off than their parents, unable to get into the housing market and reliant on the bank of mum and dad until well into their twenties. There is no reason to believe that the situation is going to improve any time soon.

Gen A (born from 2012), the children of Millennials, will be at undergraduate entry age around 2030, just as the demographic boom of the 2020s starts to go against UK universities.

A disenchanted Gen Y might be regretting the return on their own education investment and could advise Gen A to consider one of the many different paths available to them.

The bank of grandad and grandma (Gen X) will not stretch far enough to have much influence as health costs rise, life expectancy increases and the Asian century shifts the world’s economic centre of gravity.

Government is unlikely to help, as unpaid student debt in the UK is already £160 billion and forecast to grow to £560bn by 2050.

The Higher Education Policy Institute or HEPI has already suggested that students should start paying back their loans at a lower income threshold, which looks like both a cost saving to Government and an acceptance that graduate earnings are going nowhere fast.

Alternatively, the Augar recommendations could be adopted in full and domestic tuition fees slashed from £9,000 to £7,500, but even if this does come to pass Gen A could face the prospect of graduating with a large amount of student debt, that they start paying off earlier, at interest rates higher than today’s historic lows.

Right now, in the UK you seem to have more chance of driving a lorry than you do of obtaining a place on a graduate training scheme.

Much has been written about the “Future of Work” becoming more skilled by 2030, probably sooner. Whilst there is much evidence pointing towards a demand for graduate skills as a result of the fourth industrial revolution, what’s to say you cannot be trained on the job by your employer whilst earning, as opposed to taking three or four years out of the workforce to go to university?

Logistics companies, for instance, are likely to be willing to train people on the job and do a deal with Coursera or the next generation of online operators to upskill young people.

With the chance of learning a skill, having their education paid for and earning three years’ salary, the attraction of university life may be less evident to Gen A, particularly when they have grown up being told that employers see online degrees as the equal of in-person study.

Perceptions of degrees as the only gateway to a world of opportunity and a comfortable income may also come under increasing pressure. Research by the Higher Education Statistics Agency or HESA and Warwick University has suggested that in the UK, on average, graduates born in 1970 (GenX) earned 19% more than non-graduates by the age of 26, compared to graduates born in 1990 (GenY) who only earned 11% more.

The UK’s Office for National Statistics or ONS says that 36.6% of all graduates but 45.4% of recent graduates (a figure that rises to 59% in Liverpool) are working in non-graduate jobs while, in the US, it is estimated that 33.8% of all graduates are in jobs not requiring a degree.

28 years later

It may seem fanciful to look even further forward, towards what generational changes may have occurred by 2045, but it is already 24 years since Tony Blair’s pledge to make university a reality for 50% of young people in the UK.

Society seemed in favour of the idea at the time, but by 2010 the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), whose 750 employer members recruited 30,000 graduates a year, was already calling for the target to be scrapped because it devalued degrees.

The current Government’s rejection of the target may be a watershed moment that reverses the trend for the coming 25 years.

It all leads to an intriguing and troubling proposition. A major indicator that someone will go to university is that at least one of their parents did, but if parents begin to counsel their children against attending we will be heading into totally new territory and a possible downward spiral.

University-educated parents actively briefing their children against going to university would be a cultural disruptor that makes full-time, in-person university attendance the exception rather than the norm.

Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD. Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

International students: UK must make hay while the sun shines

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece  First printed in University World News 18 September 2021

Champagne glasses were raised at the PIEoneer Awards in London’s Guildhall on 3 September, a sparkling event where many higher education colleagues were able to mingle face to face in the United Kingdom for the first time in almost two years. The event was directly followed by the release of the Universities UK International (UUKi) and IDP Connect paper, “International Student Recruitment: Why aren’t we second? Part 2”.

This was not meant to throw a damp blanket over the celebrations but was rather a dose of reality as hangovers subsided. In truth, the reality is that the UK is probably already second, given that one of their main competitors, Australia, is on the ropes and the paper does not criticise a lack of ambition in the government’s plan to attract 600,000 international students by 2030. It is time for the sector to be more ambitious and answer the question: How and where can we be first?

Despite the challenges of this year, UK higher education has emerged from the global pandemic largely unscathed in contrast to the competition. International student numbers were challenged in 2020-21, but applications and acceptance data from UCAS is hard proof that the UK in 2021 is an attractive and welcoming destination for international students. Despite political tensions, the UK’s relationship with China seems to have weathered the storm, something which cannot be said for Australia, Canada or the United States.

The UK is the leading destination for Chinese students this year and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. An Education International Cooperation Group survey found, for the third consecutive year, that the UK achieved favoured status – something previously held by the United States. Nearly 30% of students preferred Britain, 24.5% favoured the US and 16.5% chose Australia, with Canada 15.8% coming in fourth.

There’s further good news for the UK, with applications from India up 13% and we see a significant jump in applications from emerging markets – for example, Nigeria is up 83% and Pakistan is up 53%. When one considers deferrals from 2020-21 and record UK applications to university for this academic year, all in the garden looks rosy for UK institutions. Furthermore, when one looks at UK population data, the next nine years could see a record number of 18-year-olds looking to enter higher education.

There has, of course, been a dramatic fall of 57% in European Union enrolments in the UK following Brexit, due to the fact that EU students are now subject to international tuition fees. While reduced European numbers have hurt diversity and quality, we tend to concur with Nick Hillman at the Higher Education Policy Institute, who predicted way back in 2017 that Brexit would not be a disaster for UK universities. Hillman suggested that, in the medium to long term, UK universities are likely to benefit from increased revenue from European students paying the same international fees as their non-EU compatriots.

Universities will need as much international fee income as they can get their hands on to smooth any bumps in the road caused by the possible and, in our view likely, implementation of the proposal from the Philip Augar review of tertiary education funding that domestic tuition fees should be reduced to £7,500 (US$10,400). If this is the case, even if EU enrolment is reduced by 50%, EU students will be paying almost double the domestic tuition fees, which will compensate for the loss in numbers, if not diversity, on UK campuses.

Long-term challenges – and solutions

But the higher education sector would do well to heed the advice that first appeared in writing in John Heywood’s 1546 book on English proverbs – “make hay while the sun shines”.

By the time they get to 2030 the number of domestic 18-year-olds will begin to decline and, long before then, the Australians and New Zealanders will have fought back from their self-imposed exile. Anyone who remembers how the Aussies saw a decrease of more than 100,000 international enrolments from 2009 to 2012 won’t forget how they bounced back with an increase of 370,000 in the following seven years.

No doubt America will be back in the international game, having suffered from a declining domestic college-aged population and the hangover of the Donald Trump administration. We already see the beginnings of this. Kamala Harris’s recent trip to Southeast Asia indicates the pivotal role that the US sees ASEAN playing in future economic development and growth. One can also not bet against Canada, whose proactive education policies linked to migration will play a key role in international student mobility for the foreseeable future.

So, with resurgent international student enrolments and a runway of nine years until the boom in 18-year-old home students falls away, what should the UK be doing to establish and maintain a strategic advantage?

First, we need robust, representative, time-series data on international student outcomes. Most students will still return to their home country after study and it is a shocking indictment that the Higher Education Statistics Agency, Jisc and the Office for Students have been unwilling or unable to collect appropriate records.

Most students taking advantage of post-study work opportunities in the UK will also return home and the UUKi and IDP Connect research shows that post-study work can advantage them as they build their careers. Unfortunately, at the present time there is a total lack of insight as to how it advantages them, with no data on career outcomes and progression or the return on investment of a UK degree over an international graduate’s lifetime.

Second, the government needs to encourage and support the sector in building its soft power overseas. Global Britain should not be about a defensive island nation but about a new type of worldwide superpower that is linked with business and politics through smart graduates who recognise the quality of education they received.

Data again is the key. Government and institutions need to fully understand the strength of the UK international alumni network and utilise its links with industry to drive inward investment and international trade. The UK’s head start in transnational education offers a massive advantage if it exploits it effectively.

Thirdly, we need to throw off constraints and minimalist thinking. Make the target 750,000 international students and introduce the sound and sensible measures proposed by UUKi and IDP Connect, but also bring together establishment doyens and a new breed of innovative thinkers and actors – “a brains trust” that understands what it takes to be internationally ambitious.

Brexit was meant to be about taking back control rather than ceding ground and our universities offer the opportunity to launch global activities from a position of authority and excellence.

The late American writer and humourist Lewis Grizzard is credited with popularising the phrase: “Unless you’re the lead dog, the scenery never changes.” What the UK really needs to do is change the scenery through bold strategic action.

We should define metrics – the best graduate outcomes, the strongest transnational education, the fastest growth and others – which allow us to compare and benchmark our relative performance. But we should also strike out to be first in every market possible as well as at the top of comparable measures.

It is the first time in a decade that the UK has had this chance and the hay is there for the making.

Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD. Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge.

Image by pasja1000 from Pixabay 

There is more to student recruitment than edtechs offer

Louise Nicol and Alan Preece  First published in University World News 04 August 2021

We probably all remember the big reveal in The Wizard of Oz (recently in the news again) when Oscar Zoroaster is revealed as a conman who had used clever props and magic tricks to maintain his place as Supreme Ruler of the Kingdom of Oz. Universities might consider this when they hear industry pundits eulogising the power of the aggregators and the Emerald City of big data. The smartest of them know that there is a place for brains, heart and courage in finding alternative solutions to meet challenging international student recruitment targets during a global pandemic.

It’s no surprise that, to date, due to lockdowns and border closures, universities have felt powerless to make an impact on international recruitment. Stuck in their back bedrooms while working from home, aggregators must have seemed like the answer to their prayers for a quick technology fix to match their new-found obsession with Zoom. This thinking was supported by the suggestion that they were low cost, simplified agent relationships and could improve student accessibility.The glamour of eye-watering valuations and bold investments by venture capital and private equity cash looking to ride the latest edtech wave seems very persuasive.

There is slick marketing, even slicker websites and the ubiquitous use of the word algorithm to confirm that artificial intelligence and machine learning can solve all problems. Anyone blinded by the hype could be easily persuaded to “follow the yellow brick road” and commit the lion’s share of next year’s recruitment budget to the Wizard.

Blinded by algorithms

But, before budgets are committed and valuable university brands handed over, it is worth taking a step back, looking behind the curtain and considering the future in a more measured way. Dorothy trusted the Wizard and did battle with a Wicked Witch on his behalf before finding he wasn’t all he appeared to be. He wasn’t evil, but it turned out that her first impressions were wrong and her true friends were really the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion.

In the case of the aggregators, those that have joined early are likely to see the best returns on their initial investment because the aggregators’ client lists remain manageable and the choices for students limited. As more universities pile in, convinced by the returns of those that have gone before them, those that have brands with limited reach or are less able to pay for placement and influence are likely to sink to the bottom. As aggregators gain clients, their revenues will grow while returns for institutions are likely to diminish over time.

Relying on an algorithm to place you in front of a student is all well and good but, just as has become accepted with Google searches, it only works out if you are on page one and preferably between one and three on the list. Showing how manipulated this can be can be seen in recent research on Studyportals where a search gave 839 courses on their ‘Our Picks’ list, with the first 10 being the University of Lincoln and the top 253 shown as ‘Featured’, indicating that they had paid to be near the top. It is debatable whether this method works in the interests of the student or the paying university.

That’s why, despite all the hype around aggregators, 46% of universities polled in a recent UK Education Advisory Service survey have not taken the plunge. They will be looking at the options and ways in which they can manage their risk while optimising any benefits that the new technology can bring. We return to Dorothy on her journey through Oz to suggest some valuable allies that might form part of a comprehensive strategy.

The Scarecrow is a model for having the brains to develop strategic thinking. Any university putting together their international recruitment strategy for next year should consider this checklist:

• Aggregators. Negotiate hard for the best deal. It is all about market share and brand for them, so they want you more than you think.
• Review direct recruitment. If you get it right, it can dramatically lower your cost of sale by building strategic relationships with international schools in target markets. Look beyond ‘Tier One’ schools which may have high numbers of expatriates who may want home fee status to ‘Tier Two’ schools to attract more international students.
• Think aggressively about meaningful engagement. Nobody needs another talk on “filling out a UCAS form” or “writing a personal statement”. Involve academic colleagues, set challenges and remember to personalise ongoing contact with schools and individual students after a first presentation.
• Get a handle on social media, networkers and influencers. Just one example is to join prospective international student groups in your target markets and search for your university name and respond to the various comments and requests for advice and guidance.
• Look to your TNE partners. They can be a route for progression, but may also add value in other ways. Examples include careers advice supporting students returning to the region or using existing employer relationships to create new revenue streams for Continuing Professional Development and-or applied research.
• Put international employability at the heart of your messaging. It is the reason students, and their parents, invest in international education. Ensure your institution has access to top graduate destinations by key international markets. Get robust, representative data to demonstrate graduate outcomes and be able to tell your ‘employability story’. Whether it’s through direct recruitment, pathways, aggregators or agents, a student’s decision will directly be influenced by their ability to get a good job and be able to progress in their career.

The Tin Man reminds us to have a heart. Do not be lured by the aggregators into abandoning pre-existing and new relationships with agents, institutions, schools and key overseas stakeholders. As the list of those on aggregator sites become longer, it is the personal touch that will end up paying dividends when it comes to recruitment.

Visiting agents’ offices, international schools and speaking to prospective students will never be a waste of time, and that personal touch is likely to be a far stronger incentive for a student to apply than their scrolling through a long list of possible study options.

Where the Lion comes in is in emphasising that universities need courage to make strategic decisions that they will stick with.

That means seeing past the possible short-term bump in recruitment that aggregators will claim and remaining focused on a game plan that both mitigates risk and builds flexible, scalable and meaningful engagement with students now and in the future. Aggregators may be a part of that strategy, but they are unlikely to be the only option or always the best solution.

Some will survive and others will fall by the wayside like the Wicked Witches of the East and the West. They will not own the student recruitment ecosystem unless universities let them.

Louise Nicol is founder of Asia Careers Group SDN BHD, and Alan Preece is an expert in global education, business transformation and operational management and runs the blogging site View from a Bridge.

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RANK HYPOCRISY

Shock and horror as the THE World Top Ten Universities 2022 are revealed as….exactly the same ten names as 2021.  A small shuffle of the deck saw Stanford drop from second to fourth but The Stanford Daily seemed more concerned with the question Who Is Elizabeth Holmes, The Stanford Dropout Now on Trial?  As someone probably once said – if you’re truly world class you don’t say it and you certainly don’t need the THE to tell you.

LinkedIn was full of university marketing chiefs and even some academics, who should probably know better, trumpeting their performance.  Newcastle University’s marketers expressed pride that it had moved into the top 150 but it had simply returned to 146th – exactly the position it occupied in the 2011-12 rankings. There were plenty of other institutions with short term memories talking without any regard for whether their ranking meant real, sustainable or even meaningful progress.

It’s a merry go round that was called out recently by Vincenzo Raimo who noted that universities tend to celebrate advances but complain about the distortion and negative impact of the rankings. When leading academics do call into questions the methodology, as David Price, UCL’s Vice Provost of Research did recently, they get snide responses from the promoter in chief.  Perhaps the THE is becoming The Borg and thinks that “resistance is futile”.   

What the THE has certainly seen is that university compliance and hypocrisy has enabled them to exploit the “trusted rankings” as a platform for THE Student.   To the mix they add a spiel about “hand-picked partners” who will help student “make the right choices”.  A cynic might suggest that the many privately financed partners on the list are much more likely to ensure a result which is in their own interests. 

But It May Be Worse Than That

It would seem harmless to simply accept that the World Rankings have become a university version of the Sunday Times Rich List where envious glances are occasionally followed by spectacular falls from grace.  Maybe The Stanford Daily is offering a metaphor by focusing on a cautionary tale of hubris and deceit just as these rankings were published.  But the THE doesn’t appear to be in any doubt about the game it is playing.

They say that “even if you do not meet the inclusion criteria, you will be entitled to a university profile on our website that will increase your visibility to our audience of academics, prospective students and their parents.”  It is a university version from the “Toxic Sludge is Good for You” playbook which Publisher’s Weekly called “a cautionary reminder that much of the consumer and political world is created by for-hire mouthpieces in expensive neckties.”.  Even the most limited institution, regardless of reputation or quality, can benefit from reflected glory as part of this commercial enterprise.

The THE sells the benefits of the rankings very hard and articulates them as global exposure with tens of millions of page views, data trusted by governments and universities, and a vital resource for students when they are making decisions about where to study. The point about ‘trusted by governments’ is a big part of the sales patter including a recent Tweet which highlighted the EU Commission’s, Gerard de Graaf saying,  “We know that rankings do more to direct universities’ attention, policy makers’ attention, students’ attention than any other policy tool… “. 

Surprising then that in 2014, the very same year of de Graaf’s comments, the European Commission gave €2m funding to establish U-Multirank explicitly, “to avoid simplistic league tables which can result in misleading comparisons between institutions of very different types”.  Dr. Simon Marginson, Professor of International Higher Education, UCL Institute of Education, University College, London called U-Multirank, “a vital corrective to the “football” league mentality that has crept into higher education…”.  The point is that the EU did not see ‘rankings’ as the answer to anyone’s problems or need for better quality information.

Gaming The System

The tweet also claims that de Graaf “urged@timeshighered to develop rankings on impact” which they framed around the UN’s SDGs and first published in 2019.  To be included in the overall ranking an institution has to self-select and submit data on SDG 17 and at least three other SDGs of its choice.  It’s difficult to see, however, that an institution can’t selectively manage its performance in three SDGs and SDG 17 while being a mediocre or even poor actor in the other thirteen.

The University of Manchester’s top spot in the 2021 Impact Rankings suggests how partial this process can be and why students looking for insights might do well to look elsewhere.  An alternative might be the  People and Planet UK-based student network that has been running an environmental and ethical performance league tables since 2007.  The organisation also does useful things like training and mentoring young people, campaigning and challenging vested interests locally and internationally.

Its 2019 League Table gave the University of Manchester a low-ranking in the Upper Second-Class Honours bracket and 59th in the UK.  To be totally fair it also notes that the University has fully completed a commitment to divest from all fossil fuels.  It is arguable that the THE rankings give too much opportunity for institutions to game the system and, as a Professor of History in a 5* department once said to me, “we are all here because we are good at passing tests”.          

If the principle is that the THE Impact Rankings are a “vital resource” for students wanting to make a choice they might do well to consider giving a broader context.  Students travel internationally to share in a cultural experience and could easily find that selecting a university based on the Impact rankings leads them to places where the off-campus setting is a little less in tune with their sensibilities.  It’s not necessarily that the universities aren’t trying hard but there are very real limits to their power.

The country with the largest representation in the Impact rankings is Russia with 75 institutions which seems counter-intuitive given that the country is only 46 of 165 in the UN’s own SDG rankings.  In early 2020 Transparency International ranked the country 137th out of 180 in its Corruption Perceptions Index at a point when the Russian Academy of Sciences was reported as finding “widespread plagiarism in Russian academic journals, with more than 850 articles rescinded from 263 journals after an initial review.”  More concerning is the repression, sexual harassment and intimidation of students and faculty outlined by the Russian student magazine DOXA.

At 27 in the Impact rankings is Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University in Saudi Arabia – a country down at 98 in the UN rankings.  The university scores well on SDG 10 for reducing inequalities at a point when the UN does not appear to have information available to give the country a score.  Meanwhile Finland, which is top of the UN league table, doesn’t have a university ranked until the 201-300 bracket by the THE.

When Gaming Becomes Cheating

League table manipulation is a theme that Malcolm Gladwell picked up in his Revisionist History podcast series.  Calling the U.S. News & World Report college rankings an “abomination” might sound harsh but his analysis points to the way the rankings can distort perceptions of higher education.  The edition on Project Dillard focuses on the specifics of how a historically black university in New Orleans is disadvantaged “even though, on a number of very objective measures, it does an outstanding job of educating the students who go there.”

His argument is that, fundamentally, the league table gives no encouragement for small and rich colleges to use their advantaged position to serve larger numbers of students.  The corollary is that Dillard University could leap sixty places up the US News rankings by cutting 75% of its students.  All of this is before the various scandals of colleges manipulating data to improve their place in the US News rankings.

In this vein the THE Impact rankings have a corrections page where any errors in data collection and changes to rank as a result are listed.  The notable thing about this is that every case where incorrect or incomplete data was submitted the university’s ranking has either not changed or they have gone up the table.  It’s a relatively small sample but one might imagine that institutions are keen to, legitimately, correct the data when they feel they have done poorly but less likely to review data when rankings have gone well.    

Earlier this year a report by the Center for Studies in Higher Education produced an analysis suggesting the QS World Rankings had a conflict of interest due to its consulting business.  QS responded that the consulting contract with the university stipulated that there was no link to rankings and that they had policies to ensure staff were “free from personal or commercial bias”. Readers will make up their own minds but as league tables become increasingly commercially exploited the risks becomes greater.

If Resistance Is Futile…Consider Changing the Rules

Nobody should kid themself that league tables have not had a material impact on decision making within universities.  Hours, days and weeks of planning and strategy have been exhausted on understanding the levers that can be pulled to move institutions up various rankings and this effort would not be made unless it fed into actions.  The available tools are relatively blunt but increasing the number of ‘good degrees’ always looked manipulable and it is arguable that the 90% growth in first class degrees awarded in the UK between 2010/11 and 2018/19 is one visible sign of that pressure.

But Forbes tells us some interesting things about “no win scenarios and ethical leadership” and draws on Star Trek’s Kobayashi Maru scenario as its exemplar.  Famously, Captain James T. Kirk overcame the no-win training scenario by reprogramming the simulation and has led a fierce debate over whether he cheated or was simply creative.  Author Janet D. Stemwedel cuts through this by suggesting “it’s important to be able to deal with trying to live up to our ethical obligations while knowing full well that circumstances and our own limitation cannot guarantee we’ll succeed.”

University league tables won’t go away and universities may feel obliged to play the game because of the political, social and recruitment leverage they might offer.  However, academics do not have to join in by offering their opinions about other universities and institutions do not need to manipulate their decision making with one eye on the league table impact.  There could also be more concerted pushback against the dumbing down that emphasizes overall rankings and oases of excellence in a sea of mediocrity or even corruption. If the aim is to help students faced with the biggest decision of their lives it’s worth the effort.

Notes

The complexity of league table methodology is the stuff of legend but it does not really aid understanding. The commentary on the THE approach to the overall SDG table reflects my understanding of the paragraph – A university’s final score in the overall table is calculated by combining its score in SDG 17 with its top three scores out of the remaining 16 SDGs. SDG 17 accounts for 22 per cent of the overall score, while the other SDGs each carry a weight of 26 per cent. This means that different universities are scored based on a different set of SDGs, depending on their focus.

As always I am happy to review authoritative comment which may aid understanding and will reflect this in an update if necessary.

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